At the time of her death in 1963, aged thirty, Sylvia Plath had published just one collection of poetry, to muted response, and one novel. Yet she is now, and has been for decades, recognised as a major poet whose life and work challenge us artistically, psychologically and morally. How did this come about, this quite extraordinary posthumous
fame?
The catalyst was the Ariel poems, discovered by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, after her suicide in 1963, edited by him and published by Faber and Faber in 1965. Many were written in the autumn of 1962, after their separation, and the final poems in January 1963 when she was living with their two children in a flat once occupied by W. B. Yeats – a source of pleasure to her. These poems, as Erica Wagner points out in Ariel’s Gift, were originally arranged in manuscript form by Plath begin with the word ‘Love’ and end with ‘Spring’. Wagner also traces with poise the interconnectedness between the two poets and their poetry. Plath’s last poems are a concentrated rush to greatness. And she knew it. ‘When my sleeping pill wears off, I am up at about five, in my study, writing like mad.’ She woke, Heaney writes, already composed in Yeats’s terms into ‘something intended, complete’ feeling ‘like a very efficient tool or weapon used and in demand from moment to moment’. She had become herself – her persona – sounding out the poems, which, as she wrote to her mother, ‘will make my name my name’. They did. ‘With these poems,’ said Robert Lowell, she became ‘something newly, wildly and subtly created, hardly a person at all or a woman but one of those super-real hypnotic great classical heroines’. Intense selfhood (‘le moi profond’), as Lowell knew better than most, can be hazardous, particularly if you believe as Plath did, ‘the blood jet is poetry,/There is no stopping it.’ Philip Larkin said of her poems, ‘They exist in a prolonged, highpitched ecstasy, like nothing else in Literature.’ He wondered, had her own talent overwhelmed her? Larkin, to whom life seemed dangerous to art, seems to pose the question: is art dangerous to life? Perhaps.
Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, to Emil Plath, a Prussian immigrant and Professor of German at Boston University, and Aurelia Schober, a high-school teacher of Austrian extraction who was twenty years his junior. When Sylvia was eight her father, a diabetic, died as a result of surgery to remove a gangrenous leg. Everything about this death is shocking, the appalling imagery, the loss of home as well as father, the necessity for Aurelia to return to work to support her children. It left Sylvia Plath with a fierce sense of angry desolation. Childhood was over. Later, in ‘Ocean 1212-W’ she wrote, ‘Those first nine years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle, beautiful, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.’
The family survived. Sylvia survived. Indeed, it would seem, she blossomed. She was a brilliant student who wrote poetry and understood her vocation early. She wrote, at sixteen, ‘You ask me why I
spend my life writing/do I find entertainment?/Is it worthwhile?/ Above all does it pay? I write only because there is a voice within me which will not be stilled.’ She eventually attended Smith College supported by a scholarship. She was a social success, extremely pretty and popular; was on the board of the college; was shortlisted for poetry prizes; and was guest editor for the fashion magazine Mademoiselle. On the surface, a jeunesse dorée. This surface impression of intelligent, attractive gaiety was to last well into her twenties. ‘What was she like?’ Eileen Atkins asked Charles Osborne, after a poetry reading I’d organised years ago. ‘Well,’ said Charles, who knew Sylvia Plath during her years in London, ‘initially, she struck me as a very pretty, very vivacious American cheerleader.’ That same evening a man came up to me and said, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been frightened by poetry.’
From her teenage years onwards Sylvia Plath suffered from severe depression and Aurelia, aware that the illness was endemic in Otto’s family, sought help, including electroconvulsive treatment. In 1953
when she was twenty-one she attempted suicide and began the intensive therapy that she would continue throughout her short life. Considerable strength of character was required for her to hold hard
to her dreams of academic excellence and artistic fulfilment, and to return to Smith. Her brilliance and her perseverance won her a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, and
in the autumn of 1955 she set sail for England.
Nine months later, after a serious coup de foudre, Sylvia Plath, aged twenty-three, married the poet Ted Hughes, aged twenty-five, on 16 June 1956, Bloomsday for Joyce fans. Of her first meeting with him
she wrote to her mother, ‘I shall tell you something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying. It is this man I have never known anything like it . . . The more he writes poems the more he writes poems . . . daily I too am full of poems . . . my joy whirls in tongues of words . . . I shall be a woman beyond women.’ These are the words of an ecstatic, and ecstatics are born, not made. ‘Marriage, Iris Murdoch believed, ‘is a very private place.’ Because of its tragic aftermath few marriages have been subjected to more analysis than that of the young poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Possibly because their story weaves together art and passion with the intensity of Greek tragedy, Janet Malcolm, Diane Middlebrook, Jacqueline Rose, Anne Stevenson and Erica Wagner are among the many who with honour have approached this modern tale of abiding sadness. At the end of his life, having not ‘spoken’ before (the protection of children often demands silence), Ted Hughes wrote the haunting Birthday Letters.
Suffice to say here that their seven years together were drenched in passion and pain, as the two hugely ambitious, mutually supportive poets set up home, had children – Frieda in 1960, Nicholas in January
1962 – all the while trying to make a living and striving daily, hourly, endlessly, to create great poetry. It was a full life, perhaps over-whelmingly so. Her early poetry did not come easily to Plath, who
during their marriage, Ted Hughes said, ‘composed very slowly, consulting her Thesaurus and dictionary for almost every word, putting a slow strong line of ink under each word that attracted her’. She herself
once said she’d rather live with her thesaurus than a bible on a desert island. She had a ‘vision’ of the kind of poems she would like to write but ‘[I] do not. When will they come?’ They were waiting. The marriage, already under strain, was broken by Ted Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill and they separated in August 1962. In the autumn of the same year Plath wrote most of the poems that made her immortal.
On 10 February 1963, having had flu, as had her children, during one of the coldest Januarys on record, Sylvia Plath took her own life. Her mother wrote, ‘Her physical energies having been depleted by illness,
anxiety and overwork and although she had for so long managed to be gallant and equal to the life experience, some darker day than usual had temporarily made it seem impossible to pursue’. Seamus Heaney took, as the title of his essay on Plath, a line from one of her last poems, ‘The indefatigable hoof-taps’. They continue to reverberate.