Biography of Sylvia Plath, American Poet and Writer

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes interview 1961
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqhsnk6vY8E

Images:
1. Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath met at Cambridge University and married months later
2. Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Cantor, Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, 1952.
3. Ted Hughes on couch and his wife Sylvia Plath
4. Sylvia Plath at right holding Nicholas and her mother Aurelia Schober at left with Frieda.

Background from {[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath]}
Sylvia Plath [1932–1963]

Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. In the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as “one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English.” Intensely autobiographical, Plath’s poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. On the World Socialist web site, Margaret Rees observed, “Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.” Oates put it more simply when she wrote that Plath’s best-known poems, “many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice.” Plath has inspired countless readers and influenced many poets since her death in 1963.
In the New York Times Book Review, former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, “Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work returns to that violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction.” Denis Donoghue made a similar observation, also in the New York Times Book Review: “Plath’s early poems, many of them, offered themselves for sacrifice, transmuting agony, ‘heart’s waste,’ into gestures and styles.” Donoghue added that “she showed what self-absorption makes possible in art, and the price that must be paid for it, in the art as clearly as in the death.” Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, “At her most articulate, meditating on the nature of poetic inspiration, [Plath] is a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality. At her brutal best—and Plath is a brutal poet—she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.”
Born in 1932 in Boston, Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober. The poet’s early years were spent near the seashore, but her life changed abruptly when her father died in 1940. Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known “Daddy,” concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Financial circumstances forced the Plath family to move to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia Plath was a gifted student who had won numerous awards and had published stories and poetry in national magazines while still in her teens. She attended Smith College on scholarship and continued to excel, winning a Mademoiselle fiction contest one year and garnering a prestigious guest editorship of the magazine the following summer.
It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe depression that would ultimately lead to her death. In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” This is an eloquent description of bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, a very serious illness for which no genuinely effective medications were available during Plath’s lifetime. In August of 1953, at the age of 20, Plath attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was hospitalized, receiving treatment with electro-shock therapy. Her experiences of breakdown and recovery were later turned into fiction for her only published novel, The Bell Jar.
Having made a recovery, Plath returned to Smith for her degree. She earned a Fulbright grant to study at Cambridge University in England, and it was there that she met poet Ted Hughes. The two were married in 1956. Plath published two major works during her lifetime, The Bell Jar and a poetry volume titled The Colossus. Both received warm reviews. However, the end of her marriage in 1962 left Plath with two young children to care for and, after an intense burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven.
Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, “I can’t recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath’s death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book.” Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century.
The writer A. Alvarez, writing in The Savage God, believed that with the poems in Ariel, compiled and published by Hughes, Plath made “poetry and death inseparable. The one could not exist without the other. And this is right. In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously.” Robert Penn Warren called Ariel “a unique book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night.” George Steiner wrote, “It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. ... Reference to Sylvia Plath is constant where poetry and the conditions of its present existence are discussed.” Plath’s growing posthumous reputation inspired younger poets to write as she did. But, as Steiner maintained, her “desperate integrity” cannot be imitated. Or, as Peter Davison put it, “No artifice alone could have conjured up such effects.” According to McClanahan, the poems in Ariel “are personal testaments to the loneliness and insecurity that plagued her, and the desolate images suggest her apparent fixation with self-annihilation. ... In Ariel, the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet.”
In Plath’s final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath, “death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of ‘Otherness’—she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees.” Alvarez believed that “the very source of [Plath’s] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost.”
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, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson, and later by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She has been linked with Lowell and Sexton as a member of the so-called “confessional” school of poetry. Ted Hughes noted that she shared with them a similar geographical homeland as well as “the central experience of a shattering of the self, and the labour of fitting it together again or finding a new one.”
At times, Plath was able to overcome the “tension between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself by literally becoming the thing-in-itself,” wrote Newman. “In many instances, it is nature who personifies her.” Similarly, Plath used history “to explain herself,” writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. She said, “I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.” Newman explained that, “in absorbing, personalizing the socio-political catastrophes of the century, [Plath] reminds us that they are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind.” Alvarez noted that the “anonymity of pain, which makes all dignity impossible, was Sylvia Plath’s subject.” Her reactions to the smallest desecrations, even in plants, were “extremely violent,” wrote Hughes. “Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds.” In sum, Newman believed, Plath “evolved in poetic voice from the precocious girl, to the disturbed modern woman, to the vengeful magician, to Ariel—God’s Lioness.”
While few critics dispute the power or the substance in Plath’s poetry, some have come to feel that its legacy is one of cynicism, ego-absorption, and a prurient fascination with suicide. Donoghue suggested that “the moral claims enforced by these poems now seem exorbitant,” adding, “The thrill we get from such poems is something we have no good cause to admire in ourselves.” McClanahan felt that Plath’s legacy “is one of pain, fear, and traumatic depression, born of the need to destroy the imagistic materialization of ‘Daddy.’” Nevertheless, the critic concluded, “The horrifying tone of her poetry underscores a depth of feeling that can be attributed to few other poets, and her near-suicidal attempt to communicate a frightening existential vision overshadows the shaky technique of her final poems. Plath writes of the human dread of dying. Her primitive honesty and emotionalism are her strength.” Critics and scholars have continued to write about Plath, and her relationship with Hughes; a reviewer for the National Post reported that in 2000, there were 104 books in print about Plath.
Newman considered The Bell Jar a “testing ground” for Plath’s poems. It is, according to the critic, “one of the few American novels to treat adolescence from a mature point of view. ... It chronicles a nervous breakdown and consequent professional therapy in non-clinical language. And finally, it gives us one of the few sympathetic portraits of what happens to one who has genuinely feminist aspirations in our society, of a girl who refuses to be an event in anyone’s life. ... [Plath] remains among the few woman writers in recent memory to link the grand theme of womanhood with the destiny of modern civilization.” Plath told Alvarez that she published the book under a pseudonym partly because “she didn’t consider it a serious work ... and partly because she thought too many people would be hurt by it.”
The Bell Jar is narrated by 19-year-old Esther Greenwood. The three-part novel explores Esther’s unsatisfactory experiences as a student editor in Manhattan, her subsequent return to her family home, where she suffers a breakdown and attempts suicide, and her recovery with the aid of an enlightened female doctor. One of the novel’s themes, the search for a valid personal identity, is as old as fiction itself. The other, a rebellion against conventional female roles, was slightly ahead of its time. Nancy Duvall Hargrove observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “As a novel of growing up, of initiation into adulthood, [The Bell Jar] is very solidly in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Technically, The Bell Jar is skillfully written and contains many of the haunting images and symbols that dominate Plath’s poetry.” Materer commented that the book “is a finely plotted novel full of vivid characters and written in the astringent but engaging style one expects from a poet as frank and observant as Plath. The atmosphere of hospitals and sickness, of incidents of bleeding and electrocution, set against images of confinement and liberation, unify the novel’s imagery.” Hargrove maintained that the novel is “a striking work which has contributed to [Plath’s] reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American literature. ... It is more than a feminist document, for it presents the enduring human concerns of the search for identity, the pain of disillusionment, and the refusal to accept defeat.”
Letters Home, a collection of Plath’s correspondence between 1950 and 1963, reveals that the source of her inner turmoil was perhaps more accurately linked to her relationship with her mother. The volume, published by Plath’s mother in 1975, was intended, at least in part, to counter the angry tone of The Bell Jar as well as the unflattering portrait of Plath’s mother contained in that narrative. According to Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker, “The publication of Letters Home had a different effect from the one Mrs. Plath had intended, however. Instead of showing that Sylvia wasn’t ‘like that,’ the letters caused the reader to consider for the first time the possibility that her sick relationship with her mother was the reason she was like that.” Though Hughes exercised final editorial approval, the publication of Letters Home also cast a new and unfavorable light on numerous others linked to Plath, including Hughes himself. Malcolm wrote, “Before the publication of Letters Home, the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms.” Plath’s intimate letters to her family contain unguarded personal commentary on her college years, writing, despair, friendships, marriage, and children.
After Plath’s death, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, a book for children, was also discovered among her papers and published posthumously. The story features Max Nix, a resident of Winkelburg, who happily acquires a modest “woolly, whiskery brand-new mustard-yellow suit.” Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer, “There’s no disturbance in the world of Winkelburg: even Max’s desire for a suit is as shallow and clear as the silver stream that runs like a ribbon through the valley.” Despite the lasting impression of Plath’s bleak art and early death, Gerrard concluded that “small pieces of happiness like this little book remind us of her life.”
Plath’s relationship with Hughes has long been the subject of commentary, not always flattering to Hughes. Feminist critics in particular tended to see in Plath’s suicide a repudiation of the expectations placed upon women in the early 1960s. Further criticism attended Hughes’s guardianship of Plath’s papers, especially when Hughes admitted that he destroyed some of Plath’s journals, including several written just prior to her suicide. Materer felt that Hughes’s control over Plath’s papers—a right he exercised only because their divorce had not become final—caused “difficulties” for both critics and biographers. Materer added, “The estate’s strict control of copyright and its editing of such writings as Plath’s journals and letters have caused the most serious problems for scholars.”
Since Hughes’s death from cancer in 1998, a new edition of Plath’s journals has been published, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962.This exact transcription of the poet’s journals, from her earliest days at Smith College to the days of her marriage, has been published verbatim, down to her misspellings. “Uncritical admirers of Plath will find much here that is fascinating,” noted Oates. “Other readers may find much that is fascinating and repellent in equal measure.” Oates concluded, “Like all unedited journals, Plath’s may be best read piecemeal, and rapidly, as they were written. The reader is advised to seek out the stronger, more lyric and exhilarating passages, which exist in enough abundance through these many pages to assure that this presumed final posthumous publication of Sylvia Plath’s is that rarity, a genuine literary event worthy of the poet’s aggressive mythopoetic claim in ‘Lady Lazarus’—Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.”
Hughes once summarized Plath’s unique personality and talent: “Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and Holymen.” The poet continued, “Surveyed as a whole ... I think the unity of her opus is clear. Once the unity shows itself, the logic and inevitability of the language, which controls and contains such conflagrations and collisions within itself, becomes more obviously what it is—direct, and even plain, speech. This language, this unique and radiant substance, is the product of an alchemy on the noblest scale. Her elements were extreme: a violent, almost demonic spirit in her, opposed a tenderness and capacity to suffer and love things infinitely, which was just as great and far more in evidence. Her stormy, luminous senses assaulted a downright practical intelligence that could probably have dealt with anything. ... She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company.”

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Nick Mount on Sylvia Plath's Ariel
As part of the Literature for Our Time series, University of Toronto English Professor Nick Mount examines Ariel, Sylvia Plath's posthumously published collection of poems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEZ6pCrDq7s

Images:
1. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on their second honeymoon at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1957.
2. Sylvia Plath typing in the backyard, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1954 photo by Everett
3. Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Cantor, Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, 1952
4. Sylvia Plath, 1947

Background from {[https://time.com/5905427/sylvia-plath-honeymoon-ted-hughes/]}
Sylvia Plath was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In 1956, while on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge University, she married the British poet Ted Hughes after a whirlwind courtship. They were both ambitious, and hoped to become the leading poets of their generation. But what began as a Shakespearean “marriage of true minds” ended in tragedy. Hughes left Plath for another woman in 1962; suffering from depression, Plath took her own life in 1963.

This excerpt picks up in happier times. In 1957, Plath and Hughes left England for Massachusetts, where they planned to spend the summer writing on Cape Cod before Plath took up a teaching position at Smith College. Plath had not published a story in five years, and she hoped to use this uninterrupted time to write new fiction that would impress editors at women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and Ladies’ Home Journal. Her efforts were unsuccessful, but the summer itself marked an important creative point in Plath’s life. Although her time on Cape Cod was marked by professional setbacks, self-doubt, and marital tension, she managed to find the inspiration for one of her finest poems, “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and sketch the outline of her best-selling novel, The Bell Jar.

On July 13, 1957, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes arrived in Cape Cod for their second honeymoon. They had been married for over a year, but their London wedding had been a secret. Now, newly arrived in Massachusetts, they celebrated their marriage with Sylvia’s family and friends in Wellesley before heading to Eastham, where Sylvia’s mother Aurelia had rented them a shingled cottage amid the pines at the Hidden Acres Cottage Colony for six weeks. Nauset Light Beach was three miles to the east, Cape Cod Bay three miles to the west. They had no phone and no car, just their bicycles, Sylvia’s new Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, some books, and clothes. Ted found the two-bedroom cottage comfortable and modern. He especially liked the screened-in porch. “When you step from the doorway pine needles touch your head, and as you sit there you see chipmunks & little red squirrels among the house-high trees,” he wrote his sister Olwyn.

For the first few days, they luxuriated in silence and ate simple meals Sylvia prepared in their single frying pan. She was delighted to see four of her poems in that July’s Poetry. Yet soon a neighbor began playing his radio too loudly, and the biting horseflies became a nuisance. “God has to remind us this isn’t heaven,” Sylvia wrote in her journal. The cottage itself proved rather too rustic—Sylvia sent Aurelia a long list of “suburban” supplies they needed (eggbeaters, pillowcases, facecloths, nail clippers, coffee mugs), while the lack of a car proved a major inconvenience. They had to rely on the colony’s caretaker, Mrs. Spaulding, for frequent rides into town. Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, felt free to drop by for coffee and conversation—just the kind of suburban mingling they had longed to escape. And even in paradise, Sylvia had disturbing dreams, all “diabolically real.” “Why these dreams?” she wrote in her journal. “These last exorcisings of the horrors and fears beginning when my father died and the bottom fell out. I am just now restored. I have been restored for over a year, and still the dreams aren’t quite sure of it. They aren’t for I’m not. And I suppose never will be.”

While Hughes began writing the poems that would go into his second collection, Lupercal, Plath worked on four stories. None would be published, but it was during this time that she outlined the plot and themes—in “The Trouble-Making Mother”—that would become the basis for The Bell Jar:

Get tension of scenes with mother during Ira and Gordon crisis. Rebellion. Car keys. Psychiatrist. Details: Dr. Beuscher: baby. Girl comes back to self, can be good daughter. Sees vision of mothers [sic] hard-ship. Yes yes. This is a good one. . . . Mental hospital background. Danger. Dynamite under high tension. Mothers [sic] character. At first menacing, later pathetic, moving. Seen from outside first, then inside. Girl comes back: grown bigger, ready to be bigger. Like mother, yet furious about it. Wants to be different. Bleaches hair. Policemen. Annoying her. Story in newspapers. After suicide attempt. Earthy Dr. Beuscher. . . . MOTHER-DAUGHTER. Troubles. Graphic. A real story.

The girl’s name would be Judith Greenwood—like Esther Greenwood, the future heroine of The Bell Jar—and she would be “a statement of the generation. Which is you.” After starting this story during the third week of July, Plath felt the “old fluency” return “at last, at last.” The story, as her confident, fast-moving outline suggests, was writing itself. In her journal she wrote, “I must say, I’m surprised at the story: it’s more gripping, I think, than anything I’ve ever done.” She finished on July 25 and sent the piece off to The Saturday Evening Post, where it was quickly rejected. Yet the writing restored her faith: “And now, aching, but surer and surer, I feel the wells of experience and thought spurting up, welling quietly, with little clear sounds of juiciness. How the phrases come to me.” Plath thought it her “first good story for five years” and later realized that it contained the seeds of a novel.
Each afternoon, after four hours of writing, Sylvia and Ted biked to the shore. There, they swam along a sandbar halfway between Nauset Light Beach and Coast Guard Beach, with “clear level water & long rollers.” The sand and the blue horizon stretched in both directions for miles; Sylvia had fantasized about such summer afternoons during the long Cambridge winters. In the evening, they read. Plath immersed herself in Virginia Woolf’s diary, The Waves, and Jacob’s Room. She reread and underlined the end of The Waves, which chilled her as much as the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” “Virginia Woolf helps,” she wrote in her journal. “Her novels make mine possible.” Woolf’s writing inspired her to believe in her own vocation and even to “go better than she.” She promised herself: “No children until I have done it. . . . My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.”

When it rained, Sylvia cooked and baked cakes. She knew she tended to “escape into cooking,” as Hughes put it, when “faced by some tedious or unpleasant piece of work.” Now she mined her baking habit for dramatic potential in “The Day of the Twenty-Four Cakes,” which she outlined in her journal:

woman at end of rope . . . quarrel with husband: loose ends, bills, problems, dead end. Wavering between running away or committing suicide: stayed by need to create an order: slowly, methodically begins to bake cakes, one each hour. . . . Husband comes home: new understanding. She can go on making order in her limited way: beautiful cakes: can’t bear to leave them.

Plath was aware of her story’s parodic elements, and she wondered whether she should use a “Kafka lit-mag serious” tone, or a style more appropriate for The Saturday Evening Post. In the end she decided to experiment with both. The story has not survived, but its outlines point to Plath’s unsettled approach to domesticity. In her stories about housewifery and motherhood— “The Visitor,” “Sunday at the Mintons,” “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” “The Wishing Box,” “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” and “Day of Success”—wives respond to their subordination with murderous fantasies, suicidal unhappiness, or smug superiority over “career women.” They are painful referendums on dreams deferred.

These tensions came to a head in “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,” the first poem Plath had written in six months. She found the form liberating: “strict 7 line stanzas rhyming ababcbc,” which she challenged herself to make sound “like conversation.” The poem had a biting undercurrent. Just as she had written about unhappy, ghostly doubles during her first honeymoon in Spain (“The Other Two”), she now wrote about another glowering married couple. Although Plath frequently gave the impression to others that she shared Hughes’s interest in the occult, “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board” reminds us that she was more ambivalent. In the poem, the wife, Sybil, is skeptical of her husband Leroy’s ability to interpret “messages” from the spirit they nickname Pan. “Pan’s a mere puppet / Of our two intuitions,” Plath writes, a “psychic bastard / Sprung to being on our wedding night.” The couple fights about Pan’s meaning.

The poem speaks to creative tension within the marriage. To others, and herself, Sylvia always described Ted as her ideal. In her journal that July she wrote, “he sets the sea of my life steady, flooding it with the deep rich color of his mind and his love and constant amaze at his perfect being: as if I had conjured, at last, a god from the slack tides.” But her work suggests a more complex professional relationship. As Sybil says, “I glimpse no light at all as long / As we two glower from our separate camps, / This board our battlefield.” By creating fictional doubles of herself and Hughes, Plath simultaneously addressed and contained her anxieties about the creative partnership. She refused the role of muse; like the heroine of her unfinished novel Falcon Yard, she felt herself a “voyager, no Penelope.”

As July turned to August, the couple became listless in Eastham. The temperature was in the high nineties, “terribly still and sultry”—and Sylvia longed for the “nip” of fall weather. The laundry came back dirty; she could not make sense of Faulkner. In late July, a pregnancy scare brought on “a black lethal two weeks” as bad as the weeks that had preceded her 1953 suicide attempt. She was paralyzed with fear; if she were pregnant, there would be no Smith job, no traveling, no novel: “clang, clang, one door after another banged shut with the overhanging terror which, I know now, would end me, probably Ted, and our writing.” She felt she would resent her child for closing the doors she had pried open. The couple biked through a driving thunderstorm to a doctor in Orleans on August 4 for a blood test. The next day her period came. But she had lost her momentum.

Ted, too, became restless. He was “paralysed” by the cost of the cottage Aurelia had rented for them—“Dowry almost” at $70 a week. He developed an ear abscess, which caused pain, fever, and severe facial swelling. “Conditions haven’t been as ideal as they’ve seemed,” he wrote Olwyn that August. Sylvia endured another setback in early August when she learned that her manuscript had not won the Yale Younger Poets contest. (John Hollander had won.) For over two months she had fantasized about her own moment in the sun—the introduction by Auden, the ensuing New Yorker acceptances. She confided in her journal:

Worst: it gets me feeling so sorry for myself, that I get concerned about Ted: Ted’s success, which I must cope with this fall with my job . . . feeling so wishfully that I could make both of us feel better by having it with him. I’d rather have it this way, if either of us was successful: that’s why I could marry him, knowing he was a better poet than I and that I would never have to restrain my little gift, but could push it and work it to the utmost, and still feel him ahead.

Now she would have to begin again. She reread her manuscript with a newly critical eye, hating the poems for what she now saw as “bland lady-like archness or slightness.” She could hardly believe Adrienne Rich and Donald Hall, with their “dull” poems, were ahead of her. She had not worked hard enough, she wrote in her journal, “Not one tenth hard enough.” She must become “stoic” again, and “fight.” There would be no more stories with “phony plots,” “the old lyric sentimental stuff.”

By late August, Sylvia had begun counting down the days until they could leave the Cape. She felt lazy and unproductive, and hardly realized that she had experienced two creative breakthroughs. In July, she had sketched a rough outline of a major plotline of The Bell Jar, and, in late August, she had pondered a coastal scene in her journal that would inspire her fine poem “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which The New Yorker would accept in June 1958: “the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools off Rock Harbor creek. . . . An image: weird, of another world, with its own queer habits, of mud, lumped, under-peopled with quiet crabs.” Hughes would later write of their coastal explorations in his Birthday Letters poem “Flounders.” “Was that a happy day?” he wondered, remembering how he and Plath had been swept out to sea in their dinghy by a strong current. They eventually rowed to a sandbar, where “big, good America found us”; a powerboat towed them back to the dock. Back in the shallows, they caught flounders “big as plates.” For Hughes, the day symbolized the life of adventure, beauty, and bounty they might have led had they not sacrificed their marriage to art: “we / Only did what poetry told us to do.”

Excerpted from RED COMET: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. To be published October 27, 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2020 by Heather Clark.

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