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158
The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath
the oppression of women, and her poetry a choreography of female
wounds. Conversely, critics such as Elizabeth Hardwick and Irving
Howe complain of her “fascination with hurt and damage and fury.” 1
Hardwick can’t understand how Plath could persist in her bitterness
toward her father years after his death and implies that it was sadistic,
or, at best, self-indulgent, to publish The Bell Jar.
Echoing Hardwick, Howe accuses Plath of not “caring” or even
being “aware of anyone but herself ” and asserts that her poetry is
“unmodulated and asocial.” Complaining that in “none of the essays
devoted to praising Sylvia Plath, have I found a coherent statement
as to the nature, let alone the value, of her vision,” Howe also
dismisses Plath’s work. 2 This negative and even hostile judgment of
Plath’s politics obscures the fact that she is one of the most important
American women poets since Emily Dickinson; therefore, it
is imperative that her work receive attention which is unbiased by
sentimentality or authoritarianism.
Born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Sylvia Plath grew up near the
sea in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her father, a professor of biology at
Boston University and author of a respected treatise on bumble bees,
died when she was eight; her mother who had been a graduate student
in German when she married Otto Plath, taught medical secretarial
training at Boston University in order to support the family.
Plath was awarded a scholarship to Smith College where she
wrote fiction and prize-winning poetry; as a winner of the Mademoiselle
College Board Contest, she spent a month in the summer of
1953 in New York City as a guest editor. Later that same summer,
she became acutely depressed and attempted suicide. After receiving
extensive psychiatric treatment as well as shock therapy, she returned
to Smith and graduated summa cum laude in 1955. Sylvia was then
awarded a fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she
met Ted Hughes, also a poet, in February 1956 and married him in
June, a few months before her twenty-fifth birthday.
Sylvia and Ted moved to the United States in the summer of 1957;
she taught at Smith College for a year but decided to give up teaching
because it took too much time for her poetry writing. The Hugheses
then moved to Boston where Sylvia audited Robert Lowell’s poetry
classes with George Starbuck and Anne Sexton. In December 1959
Sylvia and Ted returned to England and their first child was born in
April 1960; she continued to write, alternating the baby-sitting with