Willis 1

A brief forward to my paper: this is not perfect. This may come as a

shocker (or not) but this paper is very imperfect. It may be an example of an
adolescent voice trying on a big girl voice. In other words, this paper
contains some very heavy mature content, and the whole subject may be
seemingly over my head. I tried to compile the complexities of my subject in
an organized manner typical of an English 102 paper. I do have couple of
note for anyone before they endeavor to read my long (seriously the longest
Ive ever written!!), painstaking paper (A.K.A Mr. Jones my English teacher).
For one, I think I make up words. Sometimes the word I thought would fit
best in a particular spot is not a word at all. But I leave it, not in a rebellion
against the English language, but as an acknowledgment of me, the teen
writer playing with new ideas. Another note is I do not feel that I do my best
work last minute. I feel whenever I work, it is my work, and Im always
striving to be my best. The last minute just happens to be the playground I
frequent most often, which turns out to be a very stressful thing.
In my paper, atypical to most academic essays, I use more than the
last name of my subject of choice. Sylvia Plath was a complicated individual,
and honestly I have no idea what to think of her. Many critics claim her
poems are masterful, not supposed to be stories of her life. Thats what I saw
them as though. But to try and distinguish between the awesome poet, and
the probably awesome regular person, I used Sylvias first name when
mentioning her life choices, and regular things, and properly referred to her
as Plath whenever mentioning her poetry or what she said about poetry or

Willis 2
what others have said about her poetry. If this is wrong, by all means Ill
revise it, but I believe my logic is sound. Frankly, does it matter if you follow
my logic? Its mine.
Two more word. Good Luck. Reading and in life. We can all use a little
luck.
Lauren Willis
Ryan Jones
English 102
28 April 2015
The Eye of the Tornado
How does one describe what hurt feels like? A pin poke? A knife slash?
Or a deep sort of sorrow, one that torments and racks the soul with an
unsatisfied aching? Can it be possible that no physical pain compares with
the distress the emotional realm can endure? These questions pitter at the
edge of our minds, or perhaps more accurately, our hearts. Sylvia Plath, one
of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century, listened
to these pitters and turned them into roars. Through her poems she explored
many hard, even horrific, subject matter leaving her readers dazed and well,
horrified, but wanting more nevertheless. The appeal to her work may be
explained by the fact that her writing mirrored what she was, what her life
was.
Many of Plaths poems as well as her book The Bell Jar are semiautobiographical. Those ones that arent autobiographical still reflect the

Willis 3
sheer brain power and thoughtful, over imaginatively twisted, outlook on life
that Plath possessed. There is no paper that can look at every aspect of
Plaths life and come to a world accepted conclusion on who the real Sylvia
Plath was. Many, many people, papers, forums, and articles have tried
though, puzzling through many pieces and works left behind to try and
understand, post-humanely, this complicated creature. These ultimately
raise more debates than they resolve.
"I too want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all
the same" (Feb 19th 1955). Sylvia did a bit of self-prophesying in her quote
from one of her journals. There are not many girls that are arguably more
different than Plath herself. As early as fifth grade, Plath was writing and
publishing poems. She was a stellar student, receiving As all through high
school and receiving many awards and honors. She was accepted into Smith
College, an all girls college, and wrote many poems, stories, and articles.
Plath at this time seemed to be a cookie cutter golden child, always setting
goals and reaching them. This was an early period in her writing life that was
spent getting the rhyme and meter down. All of her poems were written to
pretty perfection, but she did not yet have the mature writing voice most
people know. In 1953, Plath wrote articles for local newspapers like the
Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Union as their Smith College
correspondent. She also won a Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle at 575
Madison Avenue in New York City during June 1953. The events of this very
important month are well covered in her novel, The Bell Jar. Her published

Willis 4
journals for these months are thin, and do not reveal too much about the
breakdown that followed. (Steinburg).
Sylvia returned from the New York exhausted. She was drained
mentally, emotionally, and physically. Plath was desperately despondent
when she was not accepted to a Harvard summer writing class and this
pushed her too far. . In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she
wrote: "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous
positive and despairing negativewhichever is running at the moment
dominates my life, floods it. Her journals end abruptly in July, for details of
the summer of 1953, readers must rely on information Plath put down in a
few letters to friends and in her novel, The Bell Jar. On 24 August 1953, in a
state of intense depression, she left a note saying, "Have gone for a long
walk. Will be home tomorrow." Sylvia took a blanket, a bottle of sleeping pills,
a glass of water with her down the stairs to the cellar. There she crept into a
two and a half foot entrance to the crawl space underneath the screened in
porch, trying to crawl into a small dark spot reflecting her gloomy, shadowy
insides. She began swallowing the pills in gulps of water and fell unconscious
(Carrol). Luckily Sylvia was found and called back. Some of the most
eventful years for Plath were still to come. Her best experiences and poems
were still bubbling in Plath. This major event acted as a creative chasm that
Sylvia pulled much work out of (not so much magically, but all the same
wondrously).

Willis 5
Although Sylvia Plath tried to be different, she shared a very common
attribute of every human creature on this earth: The desire to love and be
loved. She expressed longingly, "I am so hungry for a big smashing creative
burgeoning burdened love." She sought after a man named Richard Sassoon,
but ultimately it wasnt meant to be. Sylvia met her future husband at her
party, and her story of meeting him became rather famous. In her journal
she wrote, Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the
only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over
women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room,
but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was
Ted Hughes. . . . And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I,
and I stamped and screamed yes . . . and I was stamping and he was
stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth
and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had
weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find,
and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he
kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out
of the room, blood was running down his face (February 26, 1956). The
relationship to follow was as wild and spontaneously frenzied as that first
meeting.

Ted Hughes was a poet that Sylvia Plath admired greatly,

before meeting him she even went as far as to memorize some of his poetry
to recite to him. They both continued writing through their relationship,
writing love poems to each other. Hughes in an interview (published in the

Willis 6
Paris Review, Spring 1995) expressed that Once I got to know her and read
her poems, I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite
suddenly we were completely committed to each other and to each other's
writing our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a
lot of shared or complementary dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive. It
seemed as though both were entirely infatuated with each other in the kind
of bonding love that compliments each person.
What happened next is the story most people have heard through the
grape vine. These details are like the fuzzy pieces of fluff under the fridge
that are not fun, only dismal and unpleasant to look at. But people cant turn
away. She found out that Hughes was having an affair. They had their issues
in their marriage, but his affair shattered Sylvia. This was not the dream they
both pictured, this was not the life that was supposed to go in the books. This
is the part of Sylvias life that seems to have sealed her fate. In the month
after they were separated, she went on a swirling poetic rampage, at least
twenty-five poems found their way to existence through the hand of Plath.
And they didnt just exist, some of Plaths most famous poems where written
during this time. "Stings," "Wintering," "The Jailer," "Lesbos," "Lady
Lazarus," "Daddy," "Ariel," "The Applicant," "The Detective," "Cut" and "Nick
and the Candlestick", and many more. Most of them would be published in
1965 as the collection by the name of Ariel. After the posthumous publication
of a collection of later poems in 1966, the international press discovered that
the beautiful young American had written haunting works of genius about

Willis 7
death and disillusionment before putting her head in the gas oven. Both Time
and Life magazines reviewed the slim volume, describing the 'strange and
terrible' poems with a style 'as brutal as a truncheon' written during her 'last
sick slide towards suicide' (Feinmann).
Sylvia moved to a flat in England with two small children into a less
than ideal situation. She was alone, depressed, cold (it was one of the
coldest winters in England), and void of hope. The rest is timeless history.
Sylvia Plath meticulously opened her childrens window, sealed herself in her
kitchen by covering the cracks with clothes and towels, and stuck her head
in a gas oven. She was found five hours later by a nurse sent from Dr. John
Horder, a doctor that knew Plath closely in the last few months and has
become a speaker of the power of Plaths depression, which is thought of
have been genetic (Feinmann).
There is no way to describe Sylvia Plaths life in a nutshell. We dont
even know if the shells people tend to try and put her in are anything like her
true self. To large extents, no human can truly understand another human,
their brain, their inner workings, dreams or despairs or desires, selfmotivations or self-criticisms. As much as we can look into Plaths own life
and try to make sense of it, no one can. Readers can, however, look into her
poems and the sheer intense and ingenious lines of prose that Sylvia shaped
and mastered. From her life she was able to carefully draw out her poems
from the river of her existence through a poetic tap. Sylvia had an interesting

Willis 8
relationship with life and death. From this relationship sprung books and
poems all challenging the order of life, the meaning of life.
Lady Lazarus is one of the most amazingly tortured and beautiful
poems of all time, stemming directly out of Plath's angst. Unfortunately,
because Plath's life was so interesting and tragic, people have the tendency
to let her biography (more specifically, her suicide) overshadow her work.
Though this is understandable"Lady Lazarus" is a poem about suicide and
resurrection, after allit would be a huge mistake to ignore Plath's actual
poetry. Plath's legacy endures because her poems are breathtaking, tragic,
completely bizarre, perverse, and heartbreaking all on their own and all at
the same time (Shmoop Editorial Team). Lady Lazarus is a fictional narrator
with a mysterious authoritative voice about her. Her poem opens with the
line:
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-
The reader is left to know what it is. It can be anything. The reader
doesnt fully realize what it is until a few stanzas into the poem. What the
reader does realize is the vivid awful metaphors full of energy.
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
Jew linen.
Plath was criticized by some for use of references to the Nazis and the Jewish
holocaust in many of her poems. She lived shortly after all the atrocities in

Willis 9
Germany and fueled the already raging fire of hurt by mixing allusions and
suffering of a nation into her everythings. Lady Lazarus uses these sort of
metaphors throughout the poem. Towards the middle of the poem, Lady
Lazarus outrightly says,
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
The reader now matches all the parts of the poem together, knows what the
creative language has been conveying. True to her biblical name-sake, Lady
Lazarus is able to come back from the dead, claiming she has nine lives like
a cat. One death experience Lady Lazarus describes sounds rather like
Plaths own suicide attempt.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
The people who found Sylvia may not have picked off the sticky worms, but
they did have to call and call. Call her back into this world. Although Lady
Lazarus claims to die exceptionally well, she always come back. Which
defeats the purpose of dying in the first place. And although Plath died, she
really in a way is as good at coming back as her character Lady Lazarus.
Sylvia Plath comes back through her works, stunning new generations,
reheating old news in her metaphorical microwave turning it to sensational
new news.

Willis 10
One of Sylvia Plaths last poems (believed by some to be THE last
poem she wrote) is called Edge. The synopsis of the poem is awfully
creepy, especially when in the context of Plaths life. The poem paints the
image of a woman and two children in death. The mother has finally been
perfected, the dead body even wearing a triumphant smile. This mother
has two children curled up to her, folding them back into her body as petals
of a rose. Its as though for this women to reach perfection, she must die
and be returned to some state of before, some state of pre-children, some
state of pre-motherhood. The woman is perfected, now takes on another
meaning: She becomes whole or complete as all the life that went forth from
her is returned to her in death. It is difficult to imagine a bleaker view of
human experience than that which Plath expressed in Edge. She suggests
that one can find happiness only in absolute solitude, the solitude of death
(EDGE The Poetry of Sylvia Plath) Plath did not kill her two children along
with herself, but she did try to perfect her life by ending it. To the reader, the
narrator seems to be speaking in third person, making the reader wonder if it
is the woman who has died surveying and describing her own death scene.
The reader might also wonder if Plath was writing her own eulogy to be
published after her death.
In Plath's final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia
Plath, "death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because
there is no longer dialogue, no sense of 'Otherness'she is speaking from a
viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as

Willis 11
one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows
as much as the Eye sees." Alvarez believed that "the very source of [Plath's]
creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was,
precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So,
though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable
risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances
surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring
whether she won or lost; and she lost." (qtd. In Poetry Foundation: Sylvia
Plath)
The twisted complexities of Sylvia Plaths life were not meant to be
understood fully. Perhaps if readers were to understand the hauntings and
depression Sylvia Plath faced, they would wish for the same awful demise.
The questions of life are still unanswered. The explanation of hurt left
unexplained. But is there an answer? Perhaps Plath answered it all, more
likely she did not. She did leave many works and a tragic tale for readers to
learn by themselves. Perhaps it doesnt matter if the world knows the true
Sylvia Plath. Do we know our own true selves? Before humans try and grasp
the beyond, we need to just be, and know we be. Plath is a notable author,
but a notable past author. Plath said herself, "The hardest thing is to live
richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or
regret for the past."

Willis 12

Works Cited
Carrol, Shona. "Existential Angst!" Articlesbase. Articlesbase.com, 7 May 2007. Web. 26 Apr. 2015
Edge." The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Web. 29 Apr. 2015.
<http://terriblyperfect.blogspot.com/p/edge.html>.
Feinmann, Jane. "Rhyme, Reason and Depression." The Guardian. The Guardian, 6 Feb. 1993.
Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
Poetry Foundation. "Sylvia Plath." Poetry Foundation. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sylvia-plath>.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Lady Lazarus." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008.
Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
Steinburg, Peter K. "Biography." A Celebration, This Is. 1 Jan. 1999. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html>.

Willis 13

Other works consulted:

Beckmann, Anja. "Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)." Sylvia Plath Homepage. 1 Jan. 196. Web. 15 Apr.
2015. <http://www.sylviaplath.de/>.
Moses, Kate. "The Real Sylvia Plath." Salon. Saloncom RSS, 30 May 2000. Web. 15 Apr. 2015

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2013/02/timeless-sylvia-plathquotes.html
http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/26/1956
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/thint.html