Otázka: Sylvia Plath
Jazyk: Angličtina
Přidal(a): petulak
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27th in 1932 and died in the age of 30 on 11th February 1963.
When her younger brother Warren was born, their family moved to Winthrop, where her mother had grown up. After her fathers death (8 y.o.) they moved to Wellesley where Sylvia attended Bradford Senior High School. In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. Plath suffered from depression and in late August 1953 she survived her first suicide after that she spent the next six months in psychiatric care. After graduation, She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter they got married. Together they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. In September 1962 the couple separate when Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair.She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe. In February she committed second suicide using her gas oven. During one of the worst English winters, leaving a note to her neighbor instructing him to call the doctor.
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school. Her first collection of poems, The Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. In winter 1962, after she and Hughes separated, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel. In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize. Also in 1955 she won Glascock Prize. Some other interesting points are: Plath’s mother was approximately 21 years younger than her husband, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas—a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, „more than life itself.“
