Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 near to Boston. Since a very young age she was interested in literature. She wrote her first poem at the age of 8 (it was published in a magazine for children). She studied literature and lectured it. She suffered from bipolar disorder and, in the consequence of heavy depression, made a few suicide attempts. She met her later husband, Ted Hughes, whend she was on a bursary at Cambridge University.

The most popular book written by Sylvia Plath is The Bell Jar - an autobiographic novel that was published under an alias. She describes in this novel the changes that took place in her life when she went to New York. She writes about differences between life in a small village and a huge city and about the mental illness that she suffered from.

Sylvia Plath commited a suicide at the age of 30.

Edge

The woman is perfected.   

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,   

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,   

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,   

One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.   

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals   

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,   

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.

    We know that Sylvia Plath was a representative of confessional poetry. It's a current according to wchich private experiences and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships are the fields that should be shown in poems. But poets do not tell about their experiences directly, they use metaphores and symboles. In this poem Sylvia Plath creates a gloomy atmosphere. The image of a dead woman lying somewhere with their children is terrifying. I think that we can consider this work as an inner landscape of the author which life has been always full of darkness and depression.

Based on: LINK, LINK and the Wikipedia note.