Sylvia

Plath
About Sylvia Plath
Brief history
Sylvia Plath's Poems
Sylvia Plath's Book
Daddy - a poem by Sylvia Plath

CONTENT
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist,
and short-story writer. She is credited with
advancing the genre of confessional poetry
and is best known for two of her published
collections, The Colossus and Other Poems
(1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar,
a semi-autobiographical novel published
shortly before her death in 1963. The
Collected Poems were published in 1981,
which included previously unpublished works.
For this collection Plath was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her
the fourth to receive this honour
posthumously
 Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in

Early Life Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia

Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-
generation American of Austrian descent, and
her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from
Grabow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany.
[Plath's father was an entomologist and a
professor of biology at Boston University who
authored a book about bumblebees.

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born.

In 1936 the family moved to 92 Johnson Avenue,
Winthrop, Massachusetts. At age 11, Plath began
keeping a journal. In addition to writing, she showed
early promise as an artist, winning an award for her
paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in
1947. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously
driven to succeed". Plath also had an IQ of around
160.
 Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after

Early Life
Plath's eighth birthday,of complications following the
amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become
ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Raised as a
Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's
death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her
life.
In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first
nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—
beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".Plath
attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High
School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950. Just after graduating
from high school, she had her first national publication in the
Christian Science Monitor
 In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a

Adulthood
private women's liberal arts college in
Massachusetts. She excelled academically.
While at Smith, she lived in Lawrence
House, and a plaque can be found outside
her old room. She edited The Smith Review.
After her third year of college, Plath was
awarded a coveted position as a guest
editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during
which she spent a month in New York City.
The experience was not what she had hoped
for, and many of the events that took place
during that summer were later used as
inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.
 She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas—a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, "more than life

Adulthood
itself". A few weeks later, she slashed her legs to see if she had enough "courage" to
kill herself.[16] During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing
seminar. Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first
medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 by crawling under the
front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.She survived this first suicide
attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I
honestly believed was eternal oblivion".She spent the next six months in psychiatric
care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth
Beuscher.Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by
Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown
herself. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college.
In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in
Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B. summa
cum laude.[19] She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.[15]

She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two
women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued
actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At
Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.she spent
her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.[

Plath first met poet Ted Hughes
on February 25, 1956. The couple
married on June 16, 1956, at St
George the Martyr, Holborn in
London (now in the Borough of
Camden) with Plath's mother in
attendance, and spent their
honeymoon in Paris and
Benidorm. Plath returned to
Newnham in October to begin
her second year.[4] During this
time, they both became deeply
interested in astrology and the
supernatural, using ouija
boards.In June 1957, Plath and
Hughes moved to the United
States, and from September,
Plath taught at Smith College,
her alma mater. Plath took a job
as a receptionist in the
psychiatric unit of Massachusetts
General Hospital.Both Lowell and
Sexton encouraged Plath to write
from her experience and she did
so. She openly discussed her
depression with Lowell and her
suicide attempts with Sexton,
who led her to write from a more
female perspective. Plath began
to consider herself as a more
serious, focused poet and short-
story writer
Married Life
In February 1961, Plath's second
pregnancy ended in miscarriage;
several of her poems, including
"Parliament Hill Fields", address
this event.In a letter to her
therapist, Plath wrote that
Hughes beat her two days before
the miscarriage.In August she
finished her semi-
autobiographical novel The Bell
Jar and immediately after this,
the family moved to Court Green
in the small market town of
North Tawton in Devon. Nicholas
was born in January 1962.In mid-
1962 Plath and Hughes began to
keep bees, which would be the
subject of many Plath poems.in
1961, the couple rented their flat
at Chalcot Square to Assia Wevill
(née Gutmann) and David Wevill.
Hughes was immediately struck
with the beautiful Assia, as she
was with him.In June 1962, Plath
had a car accident which she
Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony
in Saratoga Springs, New York in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true described as one of many suicide
to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply attempts. In July 1962, Plath
personal and private material.[4][24] The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived
in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English
discovered Hughes had been
Heritage plaque records Plath's residence.[25][26] Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960, having an affair with Assia Wevill;
and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus.[25] in September Plath and Hughes
separated.
the most important personality traits of Sylvia Plath, the poet and writer
Sylvia oscillated between positions of dependency and independence; she

Personality
was characterised by sexual inhibition and promiscuity, writer's block and
an explosion of writing, achievement con- straint and liberation from the
constraint, emotional dependence and independence. Paradoxically, she
committed suicide when far more things tied her to life than was the case
before her first suicide attempt.
Her neurasthenic, sometimes bipolar mode of existence determined her
everyday behaviour: fatigue, irritability, a low ability to tolerate failure, a
tendency to somatisation, anxious attitude, low self-esteem
She lived between extremes: insensitivity and over-sensitivity, bad and good
moods, ego systole and ego diastole, ambivalence towards close family
members (father, mother, Ted), relationship fluctuating between adoration
and hate
Her poetry persona was characterised by object phobia: in her poems
objects become hooks, loops, traps
She was ambivalent towards both women and men: she hated women, while
her effective therapist was a woman; she was jealous of men, she was not
capable of a symmetrical partner relationship, she was either subordinate
or superior.
Poems by Sylvia Plath
 tulips
Its subject is relatively
straightforward: a woman,
recovering from a procedure
in a hospital, receives a
bouquet of tulips that affront
her with their glaring color
and vividness. She details the
manner in which they bother
her, insisting she prefers to
be left alone in the quiet
whiteness of her room
 mad girl's love song
Mad Girl's Love Song" is a villanelle written by the
American poet Sylvia Plath in 1953, when Plath was in
her third year at Smith College. As its title suggests,
the poem deals with themes of both heartbreak and
mental illness. The speaker laments a lost love even
as she repeatedly suggests that this love was simply a
figment of her imagination all along. That said, as
with much of Plath's poetry, the poem's meaning is
ultimately open to interpretation. "Mad Girl's Love
Song" was officially published in the August 1953 issue
of the women's magazine Mademoiselle. Plath herself
battled with mental illness throughout her short life,
and died by suicide at the age of 30
Two Lovers and a
Beachcomber by the
Real Sea
'Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the
Real Sea' by Sylvia Plath explores
imagination. Reality, the speaker
realizes, doesn't always live up to what
one imagined. This is a six stanza
poem, written from the perspective of
a lover remembering her time in a
place of happiness
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar, novel by Sylvia Plath, first published in January 1963 under
the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and later released posthumously under
her real name.The work, a thinly veiled autobiography, chronicles a
young woman’s mental breakdown and eventual recovery, while also
exploring societal expectations of women in the 1950s. Plath committed
suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, her only novel.
summary The Bell Jar details the life of Esther Greenwood, a college student who dreams
of becoming a poet. She is selected for a month-long summer internship as a
guest editor of Ladies’ Day magazine, but her time in New York City is unfulfilling
as she struggles with issues of identity and societal norms. She meets two other
interns who manifest contrasting views of femininity as well as Esther’s own
internal conflicts: the rebellious and sexual Doreen and the wholesome and
virginal Betsy. During this time, Esther thinks about her boyfriend, Buddy
Willard, and her anger when he admitted that he was not a virgin, claiming to
have been seduced. She believes he is a hypocrite, having acted as if she was
more sexually experienced. After being rejected for a writing class, Esther must
spend the rest of her summer at home with her mother; Esther’s father died
when she was young. She struggles to write a novel and becomes increasingly
despondent, making several half-hearted suicide attempts. She ultimately
overdoses on sleeping pills but survives.
summary Esther is admitted to a mental institute, where she is treated by a
progressive psychiatrist who, among other things, eases her
concerns about premarital sex and encourages her to obtain a
diaphragm. In addition, Esther undergoes electric-shock treatment,
which makes her feel as if she has been freed from a bell jar. While
on a night pass, Esther loses her virginity, which she sees as a
millstone. When she begins hemorrhaging, she seeks the help of
another patient, Joan, who goes with her to the emergency room.
Shortly thereafter Joan commits suicide, and her death seems to
quell Esther’s own suicidal thoughts. The novel ends with a seemingly
reborn Esther about to face the examination board, which will
decide if she can go home.
 Women and Femininity
Themes
The Bell Jar challenges the prevailing notion in the 1950s that
women were inferior to, and dependent upon, men. Regardless
of their individual talents and desires, women were expected to
become wives and mothers, and, failing that, secretaries. Bright
young women such as Esther were expected to sacrifice their
own dreams to the needs of their husbands. The novel mocks the
assumption that women are inferior to men by showing the
hypocrisy and moral weakness of the male characters. But it also
takes an axe to the myth of maternity as the epitome of
womanhood through its grotesque images of pregnancy and
birth.
 Society and Class
Plath's novel offers a cynical take on the complacency of middle-class
Themes
American society in the 1950s. All the markers of American prosperity –
consumerism, the baby boom, global supremacy – are viewed as
suffocating and stifling (for more on the historical context, check out
"Setting"). The enormous pressure to conform to social standards – of
femininity, for example – results in the suppression of individuality.
Characters who do conform are often portrayed as unfeeling, "numb"
automatons, and the similarities between the mentally ill and "normal"
people are often remarked. Esther's feeling of being confined under a
bell jar not only describes her depression, but also serves as a general
metaphor for a society muffled into uniformity by its own norms and
conventions.
 Madness
Told through Esther's perspective, The Bell Jar gives a vivid account of
Themes
one individual's experience with suicidal depression. But Esther's acute
social observations and her acid wit have to make you wonder whether
much of her "madness" is actually just a reaction against the pressures
of social convention, a form of protest, if you will. The novel is also an
indictment of the sometimes inhumane practices of the psychiatric
profession at the time. In the novel, treatments such as
electroconvulsive shock therapy and insulin shock therapy (a practice
where patients are pumped full of insulin until they experience a brief
coma) render patients into vacuous robots. The novel is critical of a
psychiatric practice that seems to have no other purpose than to turn
its female patients into Stepford Wives.
Daddy
POEM BY SYLVIA PLATH
DADDY" IS A CONTROVERSIAL AND HIGHLY ANTHOLOGIZED

POEM BY THE AMERICAN POET SYLVIA PLATH. PUBLISHED

POSTHUMOUSLY IN 1965 AS PART OF THE COLLECTION

ARIEL, THE POEM WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN OCTOBER

1962, A MONTH AFTER PLATH'S SEPARATION FROM HER

HUSBAND, THE POET TED HUGHES, AND FOUR MONTHS

BEFORE HER DEATH BY SUICIDE. IT IS A DEEPLY COMPLEX

POEM INFORMED BY THE POET'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HER

DECEASED FATHER, OTTO PLATH. TOLD FROM THE

PERSPECTIVE OF A WOMAN ADDRESSING HER FATHER, THE

MEMORY OF WHOM HAS AN OPPRESSIVE POWER OVER

HER, THE POEM DETAILS THE SPEAKER'S STRUGGLE TO

BREAK FREE OF HIS INFLUENCE.

THEME
LOVE, HATRED, AND LOSS ARE THE MAJOR THEMES IN THE

POEM. THE TORMENTED SPEAKER DESCRIBES HER LIFE

WITH HER FATHER BEFORE HIS DEATH. HE NEVER GAVE HER

LOVE AND SUPPORT AND FORCED HER TO LIVE A LIFE OF

SUFFERINGS, MISERY, AND PAIN. THE EXPERIENCE AND

TORTURE TOOK AWAY HER IDENTITY. DESPITE HIS COLD

BEHAVIOR, SHE LOVED HIM DEARLY. UNFORTUNATELY, HER

HUSBAND, WHO RESEMBLED HER FATHER IS COMPARED TO

A VAMPIRE, MUST HAVE ABUSED HER AND HER MARRIAGE

LASTED SEVEN YEARS. BY THE END OF THE POEM, SHE

GIVES UP AND STOPS RUNNING AFTER THE SHADOW OF

HER FATHER.
LITERARY DEVICES
METAPHOR: IT IS A FIGURE OF SPEECH IN WHICH AN

IMPLIED COMPARISON IS MADE BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT

OBJECTS. THE POET HAS COMPARED HER FATHER,

HUSBAND AND MOST MEN, IN GENERAL WITH, ‘BLACK

SHOE’; ‘GHASTLY STATUE’; ‘PANZER- MAN’ AND ‘VAMPIRE’.

PERSONIFICATION: PERSONIFICATION IS TO GIVE HUMAN

QUALITIES TO INANIMATE OBJECTS. THE POET DESCRIBES

HER FATHER AS A TRAIN TAKING HER TO A

CONCENTRATION CAMP. FOR EXAMPLE,

“AN ENGINE, AN ENGINE

CHUFFING ME OFF LIKE A JEW"

ONOMATOPOEIA: IT REFERS TO THE WORD WHICH IMITATES

THE NATURAL SOUNDS OF THE THINGS. FOR EXAMPLE,

‘ACHOO’ AND ‘ICH’.

LITERARY DEVICES
ALLITERATION: ALLITERATION IS THE REPETITION OF

CONSONANT SOUNDS IN THE SAME LINE SUCH AS THE

SOUND OF /M/ IN “I MADE A MODEL OF YOU,” AND THE

SOUND OF /H/ IN “DADDY, I HAVE HAD TO KILL YOU”.

IMAGERY: IMAGERY IS USED TO MAKE READERS PERCEIVE

THINGS INVOLVING THEIR FIVE SENSES. FOR EXAMPLE,

“ANY MORE, BLACK SHOE, IN WHICH I HAVE LIVED LIKE A

FOOT”; “AND YOUR ARYAN EYE, BRIGHT BLUE” AND “BUT

THEY PULLED ME OUT OF THE SACK.”

SIMILE: IT IS A FIGURE OF SPEECH USED TO COMPARE

AND TO MAKE THE MEANINGS CLEAR TO THE READERS.

THERE ARE TWO SIMILES USED IN THIS POEM. FOR

EXAMPLE, “BIG AS A FRISCO SEAL”. THE FATHER’S TOE IS

COMPARED TO A MASSIVE SAN FRANCISCO’S SEAL. IN THE

SIXTH STANZA, “I BEGAN TO TALK LIKE A JEW” THE POET

COMPARES HERSELF WITH THE JEWS

"DADDY" AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF LOSS
THIS POEM IS WRITTEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A

DAUGHTER WHO HAS LOST HER FATHER. THE SPEAKER,

VERY SKILLFULLY, PRESENTS THE GRAPHIC PICTURE OF HER

FATHER AND NARRATES HOW HER FATHER USED TO TREAT

HER WHEN HE WAS ALIVE. IRONICALLY, SHE NEITHER

LONGS TO SEE HIM AGAIN NOR DOES SHE LAMENT HIS

LOSS. INSTEAD, SHE TALKS ABOUT THE FREEDOM AND

RELIEF SHE FEELS AFTER HIS DEATH. HER FATHER WAS A

HARSH AND OBSCENE GERMAN MAN WHO FAILED TO GIVE

HER COMFORT, LOVE, AND SUPPORT SHE NEEDED AND

CRIPPLED HER LIFE. EVEN THOUGH HE WAS CRUEL, BRUTAL

AND OVERBEARING, SHE LOVED HIM. ALSO, AFTER HIS

DEATH, SHE MARRIED A MAN WHO LOOKED LIKE HER

FATHER WHICH ADDED MORE PAIN TO HER MEMORIES.

THROUGHOUT THE POEM, SHE COMPARES HERSELF WITH

JEWS AND HER FATHER WITH NAZIS TO EXPLAIN HER

FATHER’S NATURE.
Done By
SHREYA SENGUPTA
SAMHITH A
KAUSTUBH SINGH
ANSH ARORA
PRACHI JASWANT