"I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."
Such a raw, touching and undeniably real quote could have only been given by someone with an impeccable sense of poetry and literature, Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1962. She is famous for her works The Bell Jar and Ariel. Born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath had two siblings. Plath attended Smith College where she graduated with honors in 1951 after majoring in English literature. She began writing poetry at the age of eight and was first published in Seventeen magazine when she was 16 years old.
Sylvia Plath is regarded as one of the major, dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century. She is considered a controversial figure in the history of American literature. People found her works cantankerous , because her writing wasn't toned down for her audience, she wrote with vigor and passion , to alleviate herself.
“I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.”
Her naked writing, however, was dark, and when read, sucked the joy out of life, yet gave it a deeper meaning for many. Her work was riveting to readers because of her attempt to present her despair, obsession with death, and violent emotions. Her works are earnestly autobiographical, and in her poems, she explores her mental anguish. There are traces of her failed, unhappy marriage, troubles, and conflicts with her parents and the problems caused by her vision of herself.
She wrote about different problems regarding not only what she faced but society at large like restrictions on individuals, nature, individual desires, and dreams, etc. but her writing was essentially different from others. She didn’t write with the superficial politeness; rather, she exposed the ugliness of what seemed ugly to her and did not shy away from blatancy. A lot of her writing also was courage building exercises with lines like,
" I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” ,
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
opposing to hurtful thoughts like-
"What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age".
Personal life.
Plath's first book, The Colossus, published in England when she was only twenty-one years old. She also wrote a number of popular articles for magazines such as Mademoiselle and Ladies’ Home Journal during her time at Smith. However, The first major attack of depression came as a result of the news that she was not accepted for the Frank O’Connor writing course at Harvard. She was very disappointed by this news and went to an extent of overdosing on sleeping pills without anyone's knowledge.
After stabilizing herself, she took a job at Boston University and then married fellow writer Ted Hughes. The two moved to London where they began publishing regularly in literary journals. In 1959, they became parents of a daughter. Life after her marriage did not get easy. Her parents were unstable, and she did not receive the emotional support that she needed to recover. Depression was a ghost that kept reappearing in her life and it worsened when her mother died of overdosing on sleeping pills, her father committed suicide following which she had a miscarriage. She tried to make a comeback mentally, by publishing her first novel, bell jar where she wrote about her attempt to commit suicide at the age of twenty and hints about her obsession with death.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
" To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.",
“I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
The tip of the iceberg was when she found out about the affair her husband was having and hence separated from him. She lived in London before she committed suicide. She took sleeping pills and consumed gas from a stove, which led to her death on April 11th, 1963.
Posthumous Writings and Style
Although she did not live to see her success as a writer, yet her writings won accolades. A week before Sylvia Plath committed suicide, at the age of thirty, she sent a series of candid letters to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher , which was later compiled and published as ARIEL.
Sylvia Plath has a distinct style, and this was developed by her. It differentiated her from her contemporaries as well as predecessors. The main themes that she explores in her novel are individualism, death, mental illness, etc. Her diction is precise, but she expresses it informally. There are testimonies, descriptions, and anecdotes in her works.
The tone of her poetry is grim and sardonically honest, which is a very tough genre to pull off. The negative connotation of words can be seen in her descriptions, and this gives a view of her being depressed. There is a lack of emotion in her works, which can be confirmed by the use of concise sentences and phrases. There is also a series of fluctuations in her perspectives. She tries to see the silver lining of her problems , attempts to discover joy and blessing of life, yet ends up siding with it's futility and vanity.
“I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
There is a rich use of literary figures like similes and metaphors in her poems and novels. There are concrete and specific images that are testimonials to her skill and excellence in her works. Her visual aids and by far the most precise and unconvoluted imagery that one can see directly through her lenses.
prominent themes of her writing include contradiction, satire to roles of life, personal quests, maternal and paternal tug of war, channelizing aggression into writing, racism.
In her final poems, Sylvia Plath has used Auschwitz imagery. There is no personal justification for the use of this imagery; it is an aesthetic step to present a pure image. Her poetry can’t be separated from her biography. The death-camp imagery is important because it plays the role of touchstone for her sincerity and lack of cynicism. In Daddy, she has adopted an ambivalent narrative where, on one side, she depends on his discourse while, on the other side, she shows resistance towards it. She portrays his demonic and fascistic violence. She presents this new elegy as the destroying image of the subject. She uses the metaphor of Nazi concentration camps to present patriarchal oppression. She was the victim of her father’s violence, and this she fights back and batters with the same aggression. She has internalized both the roles of avenger and victim. She descends into darkness and then rises as a terrible mother in her collection Ariel. She has made her poetry unusual, not with her preoccupation with death but with a mysterious rebirth, and she ascends not to redeem herself but to seek vengeance.
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.",
"I have always been extremely fond of the definition of Death which says it is: Inaccessibility to Experience.”
“Dying ,Is an art, like everything else ,I do it exceptionally well."
"I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it."
Her final works are way more graphic, cynical and harsh, and in many ways a cry for help. At this point, she makes the readers aware that it is her story she is portraying and is not a mere figment of creativity and imagination.
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed."
" I talk to God , but the sky is empty".
The impact she created in the 3 decades that she managed to live through, is something many writers cannot replicate in a lifetime. While her work can be woke and traumatic to many, Plath sets the stage & the world as witness to her tumultuous life and portrays her astounding ability to express the inexpressible.
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
~SVP
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