Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath’s darkness is seductive at best but replicable at worst. It is rare to find a poet as studied and as raw as Plath; her troubled life acts as a haunting melody for the symphony of her acclaimed writings. Born to Aurelia Schober and the dominating Otto Plath in Boston on October 27th, 1932, Plath’s literary precociousness mingled with the intrinsic sadness and struggle that would come to dominate her life (Biography.com Editors; “Sylvia Plath”). The parallels between Plath’s poetry and her life are expected; she, along with Anne Sexton and Richard Lowell, are often associated with the confessional poetry movement (“Sylvia”). For example, her poem “Daddy”, written shortly after her husband left her in 1962, has obvious parallels to her father Otto, whose death when Plath was eight years old irrevocably changed her, and whose controlling nature seeped through the grave, print, and Sylvia’s future mental health (“Sylvia”; Wagner-Martin).

Later, she became the recipient of a scholarship to Smith College and a Fulbright Fellowship in 1955 to Cambridge, where she met Ted Hughes, her future husband. Hughes and Plath married in the summer of 1956, and the young couple decided to live in America for a few years (“Sylvia”; Biography.com Editors). They returned to England in 1959, and the couple welcomed their daughter Frieda in 1960 along with the publication of Plath’s first poetry collection, The Colossus (Biography.com Editors). The year 1962, or the year before her death is easily categorized as the most important year of Plath’s life. In this year, her son Nicholas was born, her husband left her for Assia Wevill, and Plath’s most famous pieces of literature were written (“Sylvia”). These two works would be the poems that comprised Ariel and her only novel, The Bell Jar (Biography.com