hopeless

Some biographical notes-Sylvia Plath

• Born in 1932


• middle class parents/ protestant/conventional american family


• 1940s-Sylvia in her youth:

- what american society wanted: sucess / profiatable society

- poetry seen as a pointless thing ( outside society)

-hostility in her family when she decided to become a writer

• She moved to England as a result of this opression of her family. It was a highly repressive family with not understanding about her needs. Against this fustration she found some kind of freedom in England and especially meeting a young and attractive man , Ted Hughes.

• Ted Hughes-It is said he was a young angry british poet with a magnetic talent, with a natural gift for poetry and intellectual skills. I ve read his poetry before and it´s true he´s got a huge impact in the readers , especially because of his brutal images . Probably he got a strong personality too, I imagine.She felt in love with him and she married him. The problem was that he was famous and she was not famous at all. She felt her poetry was not as good as she thought it should be. The fact is that it was totally the opposite , she was a really good student and she was always winning the best prizes.

• She started to have an ANXIETY FEELING, the thing of having to prove herself in the eyes of Hughes. He was her lover, her husband and some people think like a father . It should be said that when she was eight her father died and this made her first attempt at suicide by overdosing sleeping pills so maybe she was looking for this figure in the eyes of Ted.

• She moved to London and gave birth to two kids but Ted cheated on her and she entered into deep depression and I am not sure about it but I think she dumped him beacuse she was alone in a flat the day she commited suicide with only thirty years old . It was an awful winter with really bad weather that year and I suppose she couldnt handle the situation of being alone and depressed with two little kids and not having time to write . We all know she comitted suicide with gas in her kitchen leaving her kids in the next room. She had a romantic but tragic life. Her husband published her collected poems after her death . Some people think he was guilty of her death and some people not. The thing is that he wasnt the same after her death . I am sure he loved her.

Collected Poems- Index

1. Metaphors
2.The Colossus
3.Tulips
4.I am vertical
5.Crossing the water
6.Daddy
7.Medusa
8.Lady Lazarus

Collected Poems- II ( by Sylvia Plath)

Collected Poems- I ( by Sylvia Plath)

Sylvia Plath-background 1

Biographical fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the error of evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. It is a fallacy though to interpretate literature through the life of an author.The term is one of the main principle of New Criticism( dominant trend from the 20s to the 60s). One figure of this trend is T.S. Eliot with his impersonal poetry and artificial craft.

That´s what u find in the America of the 50s. You can´t write about yourself and there ´s a narrow capacity of moving to express the poet´s feelings. With all this background an important book appeared , Life Studies (Robert Lowell:1959), a book that reflected stylistic changes that seemed more in line with the popular openness of Beat and Confessional poetry. It opened the way to next biographical experiments and openness of the feelings in the poem. Sylvia Plath was a traditional , neo-romantic and expressionist poet. In the early 60s she started to write confessionalist poetry or what´s the same, poetry about herself. She followed Robert Lowell as a leader.