Sylvia Plath is known for being one of the world’s most talented and devastating poets. She’s also globally praised for her famous poem and her popular book. But who is Sylvia Plath? What kind of life did she have to help her become the world-famous author she was back in the 1950s and ’60s — and is still talked about today!
Plath always aspired to be a writer and an artist all her life. When she was 8, she wrote and published her very first poem, and won an award at age 15 for a painting of hers. But when she excelled in both fields, she quickly made writing her primary aspiration.
Plath’s most popular work is a haunting American classic. However, the process of publishing such an emotionally complicated book did not run smoothly. Originally, she published it under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” in 1963; however, this novel is supposedly semi-autobiographical, with the names of people and places changed to further conceal her identity. She likely did this because the book is filled with emotional and psychological turmoil that the main character faces; Plath probably wanted to hide from the public, to write and share her feelings and thoughts without it being tied to her–repressing and concealing how she herself really feels. The New York Times talks about the novel’s protagonist and speaker, who is presumably Plath herself, and how the “account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. This is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature.”
We can see from this that not only is the contrast between the book being both witty and disturbing evidence of Plath’s talent in writing, but also that people were very pleased with her novel–ironic, knowing that she originally published it under a different name, as if ashamed of her astounding work that society still talks about today, 62 years later.
Sylvia Plath’s poems can now be found in one singular book of all of her collected poems, which was published in 1981–18 years after she died. It consists of 337 of her poems. Since it was published nearly 20 years after her death, her husband Ted Hughes, a poet himself, edited and published her work for her–all her drafts and unfinished poems were published and adored by its readers.
It is a common theme among talented artists and writers like Plath, Kafka, and Van Gogh who showed their pain through their art, to be ashamed of their work and want to hide it away or get rid of it, when really, years and decades later, we fawn over their work and teach it in classrooms. It is always the most disturbing or emotional, and devastating works of art that leave the biggest impact on people. It is said that this kind of art “disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed”; a quote for how the more emotionally intelligent or distressed people will connect with Plath and other famous artists’ work more than other people would.
