User talk:Randana706

Sylvia Plath

. Full name    Sylvia Plath, pseudonym Victoria Lucas . Born   October 27, 1932, Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, United States  Death  February 11, 1963, Primrose Hill, London, United Kingdom . Childhood and Early life      Early life Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts.[3][4] 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, Germany.[5] Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who authored a book about bumblebees.[6]

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born,[4] and in 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts.[7] Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section.[8] Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers.[9] At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal.[9] 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.[10] "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed".[9] Plath also had an IQ of around 160.[11][12]

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday,[6] 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. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life.[13] Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery, in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path". After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942.[6] 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".[4][14] Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.[4] Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor.[9]

Career     Career and marriage

Plath's stay at McLean Hospital inspired her novel The Bell Jar Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive),[21] Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:

I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.[21]

Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God."[4]

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.[22]

In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States, and from September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write,[19] and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).[19]

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.[4] At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.[23] Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.[4]

Chalcot Square, near Primrose Hill in London, Plath and Hughes' home from 1959 Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York State in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply 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 Heritage plaque records Plath's residence.[25][26] Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus.[25]

In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event.[27] In a letter to her therapist, Plath wrote that Hughes beat her two days before the miscarriage.[28] 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.[25] In mid-1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.[4]

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.[29] In June 1962, Plath had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill and in September the couple separated.[25]

Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection Ariel during the final months of her life.[25][30][31] In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.

The northern winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone.[32] Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection, which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in January 1963, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.[33]

Final depressive episode and death Before her death, Plath tried several times to take her own life.[34] On August 24, 1953, Plath overdosed on pills in the cellar of her mother's home. In June 1962, Plath drove her car off the side of the road, into a river, which she later said was an attempt to take her own life.[35]

In January 1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner[34] and a close friend who lived near her. She described the current depressive episode she was experiencing; it had been ongoing for six or seven months.[34] While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life."[34] Plath struggled with insomnia, taking medication at night to induce sleep, and frequently woke up early.[34] She lost 20 pounds.[34] However, she continued to take care of her physical appearance and did not outwardly speak of feeling guilty or unworthy.[34]

23 Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill, London, where Plath died by suicide Horder prescribed her an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,[34] a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect.[36]

The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths.[37] At approximately 4:30 a.m. Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on.[38] She was 30 years old.

Some have suggested that Plath had not intended to kill herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder," including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note.[39] However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker, wrote, "According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office, [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven and had really meant to die."[40] Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion."[38] Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart."[41] In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help,[38] and spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."[42