1. Born in 1932 to middle class parents in
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath
published her first poem at the age of eight.
A sensitive person who tended to be a bit of a
perfectionist she was what many would
consider a model daughter and student popular, a straight A student, always winning
the best prizes. She won a scholarship to
Smith College in 1950 and even then she had
an enviable list of publications. While at
Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.
In 1956 she married Ted
Hughes, an English
poet, and in 1960, at the age
of twenty-eight she
published her first
book, The Colossus in
England. The poems found
in the book clearly showed
the dedication with which
she pursued her
apprenticeship, yet they
only gave a taste of what was
to come in the poems she
began writing in early 1961.
She and Hughes settled for a
brief time in an English
country village in
Devon, England.
However, less than two
years after the birth of their
first child the marriage
However, beneath the
surface of her seeming
perfection were some grave
discontinuities, some which
probably were caused by the
death of her father, an
entomologist, when she was
eight. During the summer
after her junior year in
college, Sylvia made her first
(and almost successful)
attempt at suicide by
overdosing on sleeping pills.
The experience is described
in her autobiographical
novel, The Bell Jar
, published in 1963. After a
period of recovery, which
involved electroshock and
psychotherapy she once
again pursued academic and
literary success, graduating
from Smith summa cum
laude in 1955 and winning a
Fulbright scholarship to
study in
Cambridge, England.

2. In the winter if 1962-63, one of the coldest in
centuries, Sylvia lived in a small flat in London, with her
two children, ill with the flu and nearly broke. The
difficulties in her life seened to reinforce her need to
write and she often worked between four and eight
a.m., before the children awoke. She would sometimes
finish a poem a day. In her last works it seems as though
some deeper and more powerful self had grabbed control
of her. In those poems death is given a cruel, physical
allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia
Plath succeeded in killing
herself with cooking gas at
the age of thirty. Two years
after her death, Ariel , a
collection of some her last
poems was published, that
was followed by Crossing
the Water and Winter Trees
in 1971 and in 1981 The
Collected Poems was
published, edited by none
other than Ted Hughes.

3. The Colossus (1960)

So many of us!
So many of us! We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

4. Crossing the Water (1971)

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings
me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old
woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

5. • How frail the human heart must be a mirrored pool of thought .
• « I thought you could not Hurt", refers to the introduction of Letters Home:
Correspondence 1950-1963 ( 1975 ) as the first poem of Plath , written at age 14
• I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead ;
I lift my lids and all is born again .
• "Love Song Mad Girl" ( 1953 ) from the Collected Poems ( 1981)
• " Three Women: A Poem for three voices" ( 1962 ) , a radio play published in
1968
• What did my fingers do
before they held him ?
What did my heart
do, with love ?