October 27, 1932, on a day like this: American Poet, Sylvia Plath was born

Sylvia Plath, pseudonym Victoria Lucas, was born in October the 27 of 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. She prematurely died by suicide on February 11, 1963 in London.

 

Fiercely intelligent, penetrating and witty, Plath was diagnosed with clinical depression. She used poetry to explore her own states of mind in the most intimate terms, and her breathtaking perspectives on emotion, nature and art continue to captivate and resonate.

When she was eight years old, her first poem was published. In 1955, Plath graduated from Smith with highest honours and went on to Newnham College in Cambridge on a Fullbright Fellowship. In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes with whom she had two children.

In 1962 the couple separated following Hughes's extramarital affair.

The Colossus BY SYLVIA PLATH I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing. Sylvia Plath, "The Colossus" from The Colossus. Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962 by Sylvia Plath. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

During her last three years, Plath abandoned the restraints and the conventions that bound large part of her early work. She now wrote in great speed, generating poems of stark self-revelation and confession. The anxiety, power and pathos borne on flashes of incisive wit. Her poem "Daddy" and several others explore her conflicted relationship with Otto Plath, her father who died when Plath was eight years of age. Following this burst of productivity, Plath took her own life, succeeding in her last suicide attempt.

The collection of later poems, Ariel (1965) that included "Daddy" and another one of her well-known poems, "Lady Lazarus", sparked the growth of a much broader following of devoted and enthusiastic readers than she had during her lifetime. "Ariel" received a review in the Nnew York Times that praised it for its "relentless honesty", "sophistication of the use of rhyme" and "bitter force".

Quickly, Plath became one of the most popular american poets. In 1966, "The Bell Jar" was reissued in Great Britain under her own name and in 1971, it was published in the United States for the first time.

A biographical film of Plath starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Sylvia) appeared in 2003.

In 2009 Plath’s radio play Three Women (1962) was staged professionally for the first time. A volume of Plath’s letters, written in 1940–56, was published in 2017. A second collection—which contained her later letters, including a number of candid notes to her psychiatrist—appeared the following year. In 2019 the story Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, written in 1952, was published for the first time. From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvia-Plath https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus https://www.ted.com/talks/iseult_gillespie_why_should_you_read_sylvia_plath