Sylvia Plath was a genius who was troubled by mental illness. She published her first poem when she was eight, and won several literary contests while she was in high school.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932. Her first poem appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. Plath graduated from Smith College with the highest honours in 1955. Later she studied at Newnham College in Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship.
She married Ted Hughes, the English poet in 1956, and moved to England in 1959. Shortly afterwards, ‘The Colossus’ her first collection of poems was published. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1962.
Sylvia Plath wrote at a feverish pace during the last three years of her life. Death, self destruction, and a sense of isolation haunt her poems. Her thorny relation with her father was explored in poems such as ‘Daddy’. She suffered from severe clinical depression. She attempted suicide and sought treatment for her illness. Plath drew on her traumatic experiences to write ‘The Bell Jar’, her only novel. Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963.
‘Ariel’, a collection of her poems became a landmark in literature. She was perhaps the greatest American poetess of the twentieth century.