Sylvia Plath - Course Introduction
As far as the poetry world goes, Sylvia Plath is a superstar. Here are the basics:
- She grew up just outside of Boston and went to the all-girls Smith College.
- She then received a Fulbright Scholarship (fancy), moved to England, and met and fell head-over-hells in love with poet Ted Hughes.
- They got hitched in 1956, had two kids, and went to a lot of parties.
- Plath wrote a whole lot of poems and a novel (The Bell Jar) all before turning thirty. Awesome, right?
Well not quite, because, as you probably know by now, Plath killed herself in 1963. Her life was not all that rosy. Her father died when she was very young, and she suffered from depression her whole life. She had even tried to commit suicide several times before.
Why all this bio? Well, we feel obliged to share all these biographical details with you because, in a twist that Plath would surely not appreciate, it's precisely the sensational details of her personal life—or more specifically, her death—that herreaders can't help but find fascinating.
In addition to her novel, The Bell Jar, we'll also be reading selections from Plath's poetry collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel.
As you may already know, Ariel is largely considered to be Plath's masterpiece. It was finished just days before her suicide and lots of smart folks see it as the struggle of a brilliant mind fighting an internal war. In this volume, she famously said, "The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it." We're only going to ask you to focus hard on a few of the poems, but you should definitely, definitely (definitely!) read it in its entirety.
First stop, though, is The Bell Jar. Are you ready for a manic and occasionally depraved joyride through the netherworld of 1950s high society? We certainly hope you're buckled in—the world of Esther Greenwood is many things, but none of them are boring.