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\u201cWhat horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising and fading out into an indifferent middle-age.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poet, novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Plath was far more than brilliantly promising, but tragically didn\u2019t get the opportunity to fade out into indifference, even if she had wanted to. The best-known of the so-called \u2018confessional poets\u2019 \u2013 a loose fellowship of writers who drew from deep personal experience for their work and whose number included Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton \u2013 Plath took her own life at the shockingly young age of 30.<\/p>\n
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932, Plath\u2019s talents as a writer revealed themselves at an early age and she became a highly accomplished student after enrolling at Smith College in 1950. However, Plath was plagued by severe depression and undertook electroconvulsive treatment. After one such treatment, she made her first suicide attempt in 1953, taking an overdose in a crawl space underneath her mother\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
After moving to England on a Fulbright scholarship, Plath met the Yorkshire-born poet Ted Hughes and the couple were married at the end of her first year at Newnham College, Cambridge (\u201cit is as if he is the perfect male counterpart to my own self\u201d). They moved to the US a year later. After a spell teaching back at Smith College, Plath took a job as a secretary at a psychiatric unit, giving her more time to write. In the evenings, she\u2019d attend seminars hosted by Lowell, at which he and Sexton urged Plath to write in a more confessional style.<\/p>\n
Nancy Hunter Steiner, a roommate of Plath\u2019s at a Harvard summer school, later wrote of the impact of her friend\u2019s poetry. \u201cIn a sense, she was the victim of an obsessive talent that sent her out into the world to gather sensations and seek wounds that could provide creative inspiration. Having acquired the wounds, she stuck her fingers into them, turning the pain and blood into the lines of highly subjective poetry that both repel and fascinate the reader.\u201d Plath herself saw her work as \u201ca way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience\u201d. And married life would be a chaotic experience.<\/p>\n