Research Guides: Sylvia Plath: Biography

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 - February 11, 1963)

The major event in Plath’s life was the death of her father, which occurred as a result of pulmonary embolism following an injury complicated by diabetes. His death occurred in November, 1940, when she was eight. The picture she paints of him throughout her work is not usually the idyllic memory of The Bell Jar, however, but a bitter assault. He becomes a Nazi, a demon, a devil—even a demon lover calling her to the grave. After her father’s death, Plath distinguished herself as a student and a precociously talented writer. She won numerous school and local prizes and managed to publish her first short story, “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” in the August, 1950, issue of Seventeen, just as she was entering college. Continue . . .

Source: McCann, Janet. “Sylvia Plath.” Critical Survey of American Literature, Dec. 2016, pp. 2401–2410. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

Book Collection

Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems

Resources

Sylvia Plath: A Protocol Analysis of Her Last Poems Personal documents have a significant place in psychological research . Suicide notes , diaries , novels , poems , and so on allow us to better understand the suicidal mind . The works of Sylvia Plath - a poet who killed herself at age 30 - are prime examples for such protocol study . This article examines the last 6 months of Plath's poetry , revealing a suicidal malaise . Associating the results to the lives of Cesare Pavese and the case study of Natalie , a Terman - Shneidman subject of the intellectually gifted , the study shows a unity thema that facilitates the process of death . The poems reveal such themes as unbearable pain , loss , and abandonment that likely contributed significantly to death becoming the only solution.
The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry This article criticizes on Sylvia Plath's poetry. Sylvia Plath, in her most ambitious poems, tackles the problem of female selfhood. This desire in Plath's poetry to trace the connection between the private and the public has not been explored in any depth in Plath criticism. Instead, most criticism reads the poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" around the psychology of Plath's life, if not exclusively as biography, then as the feminist struggles of a victorious woman over a man or men. despite imagery to the contrary. The poems do not bear out the critics' assumptions. When Plath evokes images of wholeness in"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," she inevitably undercuts them, emphasizing the systematic play of elements and the constructedness of meanings. She moves out of the skin of the individual and sketches out the social game, the intersubjective complexes rather than the inner strife that Judith Kroll and other Plath critics focus on. Plath de-emphasizes identity and emphasizes the roles of various systems.
Love, attachment and effacement: Romantic dimensions in Sylvia Plath's children poems This article examines seventeen children poems by Sylvia Plath written in the years 1960-63, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies (Klein, 1975; O'Reilly, 2010; Rich, 1976; Winnicott, 1956, 1965, 1967), the maternal shift in psychoanalysis (see Bueskens, 2014: 3-6), and attachment theory (Bowlby, 1950, 1969, 1988), it reads love as a continuous human disposition, informed by one's attachment history, and realized at different stages of one's life (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). It specifically refers to Daniel Stern's and Anthony Giddens's largely overlapping concepts of maternal and romantic love to argue that Plath's children poems are significantly infused with a poetics of romantic love. This poetics, however, becomes gradually compromised by a poetics of ambivalence, withdrawal, and self-effacement.
The Father as Muse in Sylvia Plath's Poetry The article discusses the role of father figures in the poetry of poet Sylvia Plath. The author suggests Plath's father, Otto Plath, inspired much of her poetry and served as her muse. He discusses the changes in gender roles between poet and muse during Plath's time. He comments that Plath used a Ouija board for literary inspiration and that her poems "Full Fathom Five" and "The Colossus" portray the conflicted relationship she had with her father.
Exploring the "Mind of the Hive": Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath's Bee Poems The essay explores an exciting new approach to Sylvia PlathEs poems and in the five poems of the bee sequence, Plath explores two different models of self through the metaphor of hives.

From Films On Demand database:

Sylvia Plath The creative intensity with which Plath confronted her experiences as daughter, wife, mother, and writer is explored in documentary and archival footage intercut with visualizations of her work.
Sylvia Plath: Growth of a Poet Through 13 of Plath's poems and excerpts from her letters, the members of The First Poetry Quartet trace the development of this gifted young American poet, who ended her life in 1963 at the age of 30.
Hardcastle Crags: Sylvia Plath–Poet's Guide to Britain Sylvia Plath’s breathtaking modern verse, radically feminine perspective and anatomization of her depression and journey to suicide brought a whole new readership to poetry. “Hardcastle Crags” and “The Great Carbuncle,” set on the moor above Heptonstall, the Yorkshire town where she is now buried, are representative of work addressing an adopted landscape when she was newly married to Ted Hughes. The film explores Plath’s visits to Hughes’s family and events that engendered this bleak take on her relationship. It also uses Plath to springboard across the valley to the real and fictional ‘Wuthering Heights’ and into Emily Bronte’s verse on the same landscape. (29 minutes)
Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Performed On this episode of Camera Three, Michele Collision and Elizabeth Swados sing the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Selections include Elm, You're, The Applicant, Ariel, Daddy, Lady Lazarus and Getting There.
Sylvia Plath's View of Marriage Sylvia Plath's view of marriage and the role of the woman is ironic and severe in the "The Applicant."