Preview

The Life of Sylvia Plath

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1258 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Life of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born near Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. She was the daughter of Otto and Aurelia Plath and she had a younger brother named Warren. She wrote fiction as well as poetry during her lifetime. Plath lived a very short life that was tainted with several dreadful events. Sylvia Plath had to deal with the death of her father, an awful marriage, various suicide attempts, and bouts of depression. Plath used her life experiences in her writings to evoke feeling from her audiences. The hurt, pain, and other dark feelings associated with the trials she faced are evident all throughout Plath’s writings. Sylvia Plath’s writing influence can be traced back all the way to her childhood growing up on the ocean. She wrote poems full of imagery depicting the ocean and showed her love for the ocean in her works. Plath even said in one of her letters home that, “my ocean-childhood . . . is probably the foundation of my consciousness." (Chapter 1) Sylvia Plath also writes about another influence from her childhood: her father. Plath’s father was a strict, German immigrant whose early death and way of life helped shape her writing style. Her father loved and raised bees, which is reflected in some of Plath’s work such as: "The Bee Meeting," "The Arrival of the Bee Box," "Stings," and "The Swarm." Otto Plath died of diabetes mellitus when Sylvia was only eight years old (Chapter 1). His death’s effect on Plath’s life can also be seen in her writing, especially the poem “Daddy.” Plath shows a need for her father through the words she uses in her poem; she feels that she was neglected by his death early in her life (Overview Daddy). Plath’s family moved to Wellesley two years after her father’s death. Sylvia was placed two grades ahead of where she was supposed to be. It was there at Wellesley that Plath began developing her writing skills and people started noticing them. In August 1950, Plath’s story, “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” was published in the


Cited: “Plath, Sylvia.” Encyclopedia Americana International Edition. Volume 22. Danbury, CT: Scholastic Library Publishing, Inc., 2004 "Overview: The Bell Jar." Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    When speaking about Sylvia Plath a word too often use is Tragedy, the tragedy that was her life and the pain that ended it. Plath is known for her cynical twisted writing, but never too far from the truthful pain no one dared to speak about. Plath was far more than just a sad woman who made it an art form. Plath was more than other women on the Ted Hughes list of accomplishments, she was a literary genius and was a face of a movement that 50 years later is still worthy of praise. Sylvia Plath should be known for not only her literary accomplishments but the voice she created for women too not only speak about the unspeakable but to be open about the serious nature of mental illness. Sylvia Plath’s suicide is said to have overshadowed…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sylvia Plath, an extremely influential and beloved female poet who lived in the mid-20th century, was the author of numerous poems as well as the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Her work, especially that of her adult life, heavily reflects the darkness and depression that she dealt with. Plath, born in October of 1932, began writing at a very young age. Her first published work, titled simply “Poem”, was published before she had even turned ten. Plath wrote many short stories during her early years, and she even won several writing competitions. One of these was a fiction contest that earned her a position as guest editor at Mademoiselle…

    • 1079 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sylvia Plath, who is highly regarded as an acclaimed American poet and story writer, was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath on October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath experienced a great deal of sorrow during her childhood because of her father’s death. Sylvia Plath expresses her ambivalent feelings and complex ideas about her father in her poems. Therefore, the poems reflected Sylvia Plath’s life. Lady Lazarus is Sylvia Plath’s one of her autobiography poems which stems from the author’s mind. The poem is written before her last attempting suicide, which she actually succeeded. The reader can use one’s imagination by reading her images and feelings in her confessional poem. In the poem, she reflected her hardship that she inevitably…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath’s father died when she was eight years old due to complications of diabetes (Steinberg 2007). He is already dead; Sylvia Plath wrote this poem when she was 30, but in stanza 2 she says “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time—“(lines 6-7). What she is killing is the memories of him; he died too early and has caused a great amount of grief. This poem is angry, perhaps because he left her when he died while she was so young. Throughout the poem Sylvia Plath uses words like “achoo” and “gobbledygoo” giving the poem a childish feel, as it uses these themes of the Holocaust and vampires, adding a contrast. The poem also has an irregular rhyme scheme using the “oo” sound. There is no evidence from sources that Sylvia Plath’s father was ever abusive to her, so one can conclude that the loss was so immense, and caused so much pain, that it was like if she was being tormented.…

    • 1791 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One can see that they had a huge impact on who Sylvia Plath was as a writer. “Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, adored by many sons and daughters, is “Daddy”. It is a poem with an affecting theme, the feelings of the speaker as she regathers pain of her father’s premature death and her persuasion that has betrayed her by dying.” (Howe 1055). Sylvia Plath’s father died at a very young age, she was only eight years old. She always viewed her father as a strict man. Plath even compared her father to a Nazi. (“Panzer-man, panzer-man, O’ You”). This poem is a reflection of how Sylvia feels towards her father and the anger she has for him dying so young. “Sylvia Plath tries to enlarge upon the personal plight, give meaning to the personal outcry, by fancying the girl as victim of a Nazi father: “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. . . .” ( Howe…

    • 599 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath Research

    • 2581 Words
    • 11 Pages

    Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 during the peak of the great depression when unemployment soared over 20%. Although she was subject to a life filled with hardships and anguish, Sylvia allowed those hardships to shape her as a socially adept young woman. Plath excelled academically, and allowed her writing to be influenced by her rough past. After marrying a fellow poet Ted Hughs and having two children, she published hundreds of works that told of her tragic life and unreasonable thoughts. Soon, poetry wasn’t enough to keep Plath sane after an affair and divorce and she ended her life in 1963 after many failed attempts. Through and through, Sylvia Plath was a very bright, mid-20th century poet who will remain forever famous for her proficient achievements in writing, trying marriage, and history of abuse and suicide.…

    • 2581 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath was a gifted, troubled poet, known for her confessional style work. Winning a scholarship to Smith College in 1950, she eventually went on to work as an editor for Mademoiselle magazine. After her husband Ted Hughes cheated on her, she fell into a deep depression. Before committing suicide at age 30, Plath had written hundreds of poems and a novel about mental breakdown, The Bell Jar.…

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Sylvia Plath Research Paper

    • 4554 Words
    • 19 Pages

    Plath 's poetry is full of symbols and allusions cryptic to those unfamiliar with her biography, so it is necessary to begin any analysis of her work with a brief account of her life. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 near Boston and for much of her childhood lived near the sea, which finds its way into many of her poetic images (Barnard 14). Her father, Otto Emil Plath, was an immigrant from Germany and her mother, Aurelia Schober, a second generation Austrian American (Barnard 13). Allusions to her German heritage and to World War Two era Europe abound in her work.…

    • 4554 Words
    • 19 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Sylvia Plath's sense of entrapment, her sense that her choices are profoundly limited, is directly connected to the particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry. Betty…

    • 4336 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Steven Gould Axelrod is an expert in nineteenth and twentieth-century American poetry, and his book “Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words” was published in 1990. Sylvia Plath was an American poet, born in 1932, and died in 1963 when she committed suicide. I totally agreed with Steven Gould Axelrod’s idea in this book, especially when he said that the poem “Daddy,” Sylvia’s most famous poem – is dramatic and allegorical. At the beginning of the book, Axelrod mostly focused on Sylvia’s life and how “Daddy” was brought into the world, then in the middle of the book, he compared how Sylvia described her father in her two poets, “Daddy” and “The Colossus,” and at the end, he continued to compare the figure “I” in “Daddy” and “The Colossus,” Sylvia herself identity.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Aurelia, Sylvia’s mother, was a student at Boston University. She met Sylvia’s father, Otto Plath, he was her professor. Her parents got married in January of 1932. In 1940, Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. Her father’s strict attitudes and his death drastically defined her poems, especially in her infamous poem “daddy” (“Sylvia Plath”). “ Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time--” (“Sylvia Plath”). These two lines in her poem “daddy” express how much it hurt when her father passed away. Her relationship with her father was strong and they were extremely close.…

    • 1338 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath was known for not having a good relationship with her father Otto Plath. Otto died when Sylvia was eight years old (“Daddy”). She spent most of her life trying to come to terms with his influence on her life and her work (“Daddy”). The memory of her father haunted her for most of her life. Since she didn’t know much about him, he was a constant search in her mind. The purpose of this paper is to show and explain the idea that “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath’s way of killing the memory of her father.…

    • 993 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bell Jar Plath

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Esther greenwood struggles to depression in the story “The Bell Jar” and not only did the character of “The Bell Jar” suffer from depression so did Sylvia Plath, the writer. Sylvia Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963. Again, this quote, “A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman,” represents that there has to be meaning…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932 of two parents in a middleclass household in Boston. At a very young age, she demonstrated great literary talent and a hardworking attitude, publishing her first poem at the age of eight and maintaining a straight A record throughout all of her studies. A few days after she turned eight, her father deceased of diabetes. This event in her life is what most specialists believe to have triggered her depressive tendencies. It has also been known to have caused the poet to hate her father for the pain his death inflicted on her. Twenty-year-old Plath committed her first near-successful suicide attempt after a whole month of not being able to sleep, write or eat properly. She recovered from her nervous breakdown and met her to-be husband, renowned poet Ted Hughes, three years later. However, after having their first child, their relationship started to go stale, and finally adultery on both their parts caused their painful separation. Soon enough, Sylvia returned to her old suicidal habits.…

    • 3018 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The both of Sylvia Plath’s poems are reviewed and matched to the Freudianism theories of Electra and Freud Family Theories. Once, Sylvia Plath explained on the BBC news that the persona in her poem ‘Daddy,’ “...is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.” (De Nervaux, 2007) The worshipping of her father and the loss or emotional detachment is what the Electra complex is based on. De Nervaux states that much like the persona in Daddy Plath’s father died when she was very young and was not available to her when she needed him to be. Plath continues with, “Her case is…

    • 1156 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics