Suggested books on Plath:

Bitter Fame. Anne Stevenson.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Janet Malcolm. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, wrote that the Ariel poems published after her death in 1965 are a record of a "real self" finding expression and emerging from among her warring "false selves."

Plath committed suicide, in February of 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven. Her two small children were asleep at the time and she had sealed their room against the fumes. She left milk and bread near their beds for them to eat when they woke.

She and Ted Hughes had been married for six years; but they had separated the previous fall because of an affair Hughes was having with another woman. Hughes left her in their cottage in Devon with two small children, one a baby, and not much domestic help. In spite of these hardships, Plath began to rise at five in the morning to write before her day began caring for the children. The poems she wrote -- with an almost frightening speed and energy -- in these last months were the making of her reputation as a poet. After a few months, she left Devon and spent one freezing winter in London trying to put her life together.

Plath's early years were not serene. At the age of 9, her father, a German professor of biology, died, and she and her brother were raised by their hardworking mother who made her living as a business teacher. Extremely gifted, Plath always strove to be the best in everything she did. She was the classic overachiever, winning every award but putting enormous pressure on herself. During her university days as a student at Smith College she took an overdose and crawled under the house to die. Fortunately, she was found in time and sent to a sanitarium to recover. She recorded her experiences as a mental patient in the novel, The Bell Jar.

After recovering from her breakdown, she won a scholarship, a Fulbright, to Cambridge University in England. There she met her future husband who had already received some recognition as a poet. Ted Hughes was wildly attractive to women and Sylvia was never very stable, a disastrous convergence.

In 1968, while teaching in America, she studied with the poet Robert Lowell whose book of poems, Life Studies, broke new ground in poetry. Gone was the impersonal style of Eliot; Lowell's poetry was confessional.

Plath published her first book of poems in 1960; she had two children in 1960 and 1962.

Plath had as complicated relationship to her mother. (See samples of her Letters Home ) Though she wrote almost daily to her mother, she resented her mother's visiting in England; she always reported her successes, sometimes bragging, but she never confided in her mother her true feelings. The letters she wrote her mother portray a wildly different person than do the poems she was writing at the same time.

Upset at Sylvia's portrayal of her, Mrs. Plath published Sylvia's letters home to prove that Sylvia was not like the self seen in the poems published after her death. Letters Home were published in 1975.

"The Colossus": pre-Ariel poem about her father. Compare to the poem in Ariel,

"Daddy":

"Medusa": compare this poem written about her mother on October 16, 1962 to a letter written to her mother on the same day.

"The Arrival of the Bee Box" and "Stings" are part of a series of bee poems:

Mary Lynn Broe, "The Bee Sequence: 'But I Have a Self to Recover." Sylvia Plath. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

"In her six poems about the art of beekeeping, Plath attempts to 'recover a self' by exploring the various operations of power within the apiary. The highly organized, self-regulating hive becomes her model for conceptualizing human experience by reexamining power in its many shapes (seller, keeper, worker-drudge), or its starling absence (queen).

The queen in a beehive sacrifices everything for procreation. She never sees daylight, has no voice in major hive decisions, such as swarming or gathering the nectar of flowers." Bee keepers "know that the mate of the queen -- chosen from thousands of suitors who pursue her nuptial flight -- lives for a single moment of delight. When he impregnates the queen, his abdomen splits open, loosing the entrails which the queen then totes behind her as a kind of triumphal banner. . . the mate falls to the earth as a carcass; the queen, on the other hand, sports her murderous trophy, proof that she has guaranteed the future of the hive."

For Plath the queen is a "symbol of ambiguous achievement."

"The Bee Meeting": a mysterious rite of passage. The occasion is a gathering of villagers who smoke out a beehive and get the honey. They move the virgin bees to another hive to prevent them from killing the old queen.

"Lady Lazarus" is about her attempts at suicide.