Sylvia Plath

“And by the way, everything is life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt.”

Of all authors in American literature, Sylvia Plath truly lives up to her quote written above. She wrote about her depression and suicide attempts with bruised, honest, desperate words describing her tortured soul. Although she died young, her poems and one novel, “The Bell Jar” are totems to females first having a voice in modern day literature.

At 8 years old, Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald newspaper. She also showed promise as an artist at 15 years old, winning an award for her painting from Scholastic Art and Writing awards. She shined at Smith College with her brilliant intellect and became the editor of their newspaper. During her third year at Smith, she won a position at Mademoiselle Magazine in New York to be a guest editor. It was during this time in New York City that Plath attempted her first suicide. After being unable to meet Dylan Thomas, her favorite poet, she despaired and slashed her legs with a knife.

This incident sent her into a bout of depression when she returned to Massachusetts. After being treated with electroconvulsive therapy, she took her mother’s sleeping pills to kill herself. This resulted in her being put into a psychiatric hospital under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher.

Plath did not hide from her horrific experiences. With the encouragement of her friend and fellow writer, Anne Sexton, Plath gained the courage to develop her voice as an author speaking from the female perspective. The poem, “Parliament Hill Fields” discusses the loss of a child through a miscarriage. Again, as a poet she is writing and displaying guts while talking about a very painful subject manner.

The novel, “The Bell Jar” is a semi-autobiographical story about her institutionalization in the psychiatric hospital. One comment in the UK Review newspaper said of her writing, “Her voice is new and strong. Individual and American in tone.”

In Plath’s own words when commenting about her ability to write from her life she said, “I think the Bell Jar will show how isolated a person feels when she is suffering from a breakdown.”

One of her poems, “Daddy” held nothing back in regards to her morbid, love-hatred feelings about her father. A critic said, “Plath’s style was as brutal as a truncheon. She is the first jet flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape.”

Keeping journals from the age of 11 to her death, Plath let her imagination, her creativity, and her despair flow out of her. They were published after her death. She finally was successful in a suicide attempt. At the age of 30 she left the literary community rich, yet morose works of creative expression.

From the poem “Kindness” she writes: “And here you come with a cup of tea, Wreathed in steam, The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.” No matter what despair she felt, Sylvia Plath wrote about it displaying the guts and imagination she valued as a writer.