 Sylvia Plath - born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

—died February 11,

1963, London, England
 American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady
Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar
 Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of
his students, Aurelia Schober.
 Plath published her first poem at age eight. She entered and won many literary contests,
and, while still in high school, she sold her first poem to The Christian Science Monitor
and her first short story to Seventeen magazine.
 As a very young poet Plath experimented with the villanelle and other forms.
 She had been “stimulated” by such writers as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Feodor
Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson, and
later by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.
 In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes; they had two children. The couple
separated in 1962, after Hughes’s affair with another woman.
It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe
depression.

 During her last three years Plath abandoned the restraints and conventions that had
bound much of her early work.
 She wrote with great speed, producing poems of stark self-revelation and confession.
 The anxiety, confusion, and doubt that haunted her were transmuted into verses of
great power and pathos borne on flashes of incisive wit.
 Her poem “Daddy” and several others explore her conflicted relationship with her
father, Otto Plath, who died when she was age eight. In 1963, after this burst of
productivity, she took her own life.
SPINSTER

Now this particular girl

During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds irregular babel
And the leaves’ litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she

Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,
Her gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then! —

Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment in border,
And heart’s frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.

But here — a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motley —
A treason not to be borne. Let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.

 Plath had written this poem in 1956 — the year of her steamy first
encounter with the poet Ted Hughes, whom she would marry that same
year and who would become the father of her children.

 Plath intended the poem as a satire of obsessiveness and of how our

compulsion for control limits our lives