Sylvia Plath |
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. This famous quote above was made by Sylvia Plath, a famous poet.
Background
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. In 1940, when she was 8 years old, her father died due to complications from diabetes. He was strict and had an authoritarian attitude, which defined his position in their relationship. Afterwards, she wrote her most infamous poem- Daddy, which is about her father of course, and I will show that later.
In 1950, Sylvia Plath published her first poem in a magazine, after graduating from high school. After that, she studied at Smith College, and was a bright spark. However, she was undergoing a bad state of depression and driven her to suicide. Her attempt failed. In 1955, she graduated.
She met English poet Ted Hughes in a party in early 1956, and shortly thereafter, they were married. In 1960, Plath worked with Robert Lowell and she published her first collection of poems, Colossus.
She gave birth to her two children in 1960 and 1962, and in that year that her last children was born, her husband left her. Shortly, she went through another deep depression and that was when she wrote most of the poems that made up Ariel, another of her collection of poems.
On February ll, 1963, during one of her worst depressions, Sylvia Plath decided to kill herself with a gas stove. She died.
From this, you can see that Sylvia Plath is a deeply disturbed woman and that it might be her father that caused this. She had no medical history and her life was pretty stable, except for her father, who made such a big impct in her life that she had to write a poem about it. Furthermore, her break up with her husband was also the cause of her depression. She wrote the poem Lady Lazarus.
Here are 3 poems of hers.
| Daddy by: Sylvia Plath | ||||||
| You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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~Freak Of Nature, 9:34 AM |
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