Sylvia Plath

Musleh Saadi
Nov 19
5 min read

This is October 1962. Sylvia Plath was 30, recently separated from her husband Ted Hughes, living with their two children—Frieda, 2, and Nicholas, 9 months—in a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road in London's Primrose Hill.

The flat was significant for a reason that seemed like good luck: W.B. Yeats had once lived in the same building. Sylvia, who revered Yeats, saw this as a sign. An omen that great work could be done there.

She was right. But not in the way she hoped.

By October 1962, Sylvia's life was collapsing. Her marriage to Ted Hughes—the great love she'd written about, the partnership between two poets that should have been perfect—had shattered when she discovered his affair with Assia Wevill.

The betrayal devastated her. She was alone with two babies under three, broke, struggling with depression she'd battled since college, in a country where she had no family support.

The winter of 1962-63 was brutal. Pipes froze. Coal supplies ran short. Many homes—including Sylvia's flat—were damp, icy, barely heated. She'd wake to frost on the inside of windows.

Most people in her position would have just survived. Focused on keeping the babies warm and fed. Given up on writing until circumstances improved.

Sylvia did the opposite. She wrote like she was on fire.

She'd wake at 4 AM—before the babies stirred—and write in a fury. Poem after poem. Some of the most intense, powerful poetry ever written in English poured out during those dark, frozen mornings.

"Daddy": A devastating confrontation with her dead father and failed marriage.

"Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

"Lady Lazarus": Death, resurrection, and rage compressed into t beauty.

"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well."

"Ariel": Pure velocity and transformation, named after the horse she'd ride in Devon.

"And I am the arrow, the dew that flies..."

"Fever 103°": Fever dream as transcendence and burning away of the past.

"Edge": Chilling perfection and finality.

"The woman is perfected. Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment."

These weren't careful, workshopped poems. They were written at white heat—one or two per day, nearly finished on first draft. The voice was direct, furious, unflinching. Nothing like the more controlled earlier work that had won her prizes.

She was writing like someone who'd broken through every barrier—technical, emotional, social. Like she'd finally found her true voice and it was blazing.

Her friend Al Alvarez, a poet and critic, visited during this period. He later wrote that Sylvia seemed "on fire with something." She was writing constantly, reading the new poems aloud with fierce pride. She knew they were extraordinary.

But no one else knew yet. These poems existed only in her notebooks and her small circle of friends.

Meanwhile, the world that should have been celebrating her was rejecting her.

On January 14, 1963, The Bell Jar was published in the UK under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas." Sylvia used a pen name because the novel was autobiographical—a thinly veiled account of her own breakdown and suicide attempt at age 20, her treatment in a psychiatric hospital, her slow recovery.

The novel follows Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman who descends into suicidal depression despite—or perhaps because of—her achievements. It captured what depression actually feels like: not dramatic or poetic, but suffocating, distorting, making the world seem pointless and yourself worthless.

The reviews were sparse and mixed. Some praised it. Others dismissed it as minor. American publishers had already rejected it entirely—they didn't think there was a market for a novel about a young woman's mental breakdown.

This rejection hit hard. Sylvia had poured her trauma, her recovery, her truth into that book. And the world shrugged.

She was broke. The divorce hadn't left her financially secure. Childcare was expensive. Heating was expensive. Everything was expensive. She'd applied for financial assistance. She was seeing a doctor for depression. She'd asked friends for help.

And winter kept grinding on. Cold. Dark. Isolating.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath woke early. She prepared breakfast for her children. She left bread and butter and milk by their beds so they'd find food when they woke up. She sealed their room carefully with towels and tape.

Then she went to the kitchen, turned on the gas oven, and put her head inside.

She was found later that morning. She was 30 years old.

Her children survived, discovered by the workman who'd come to clear the snow. They were safe, just as she'd planned.

But Sylvia was gone. And she never knew what would happen next.

Ted Hughes, despite their separation, became her literary executor. He published Ariel in 1965—the collection of those final, blazing poems written during that terrible winter.

Readers, especially women, felt seen for the first time. Sylvia had written about rage, about feeling trapped, about the pressure to be perfect, about depression—and she'd written it directly, without euphemism or prettiness.

The confessional poetry movement claimed her. Feminists claimed her. She became an icon, though one she never chose to be.

The Bell Jar was finally published in America in 1971, eight years after her death. It became required reading in schools and universities. Generations of students read Esther Greenwood's story and recognized their own struggles with identity, pressure, depression.

In 1982—nineteen years after her death—Sylvia Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Collected Poems.

She was the first poet to win posthumously.

All that recognition—the awards, the fame, the impact—came after she was gone.

She died thinking her work didn't matter.

But it mattered. Enormously. Those poems she wrote in the dark—they changed modern poetry. They gave voice to experiences that had been silent. They proved that women's rage, women's pain, women's inner lives were worthy subjects for great art.

The tragedy isn't just that she died at 30. It's that she died believing she'd failed.

Success arrived too late. Recognition came after she couldn't receive it. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a woman who'd been dead for nineteen years.

Sylvia Plath's story asks painful questions: How many artists die before their work is recognized? How many give up just before breakthrough? How much talent is lost to depression, poverty, lack of support?

Her work endures—taught in universities, published in dozens of languages, read by millions. Ariel is considered one of the essential poetry collections of the 20th century. The Bell Jar has never gone out of print.

But she never knew. She wrote those poems thinking barely anyone would read them. She died believing herself a rejected novelist and minor poet.

The world proved her wrong. Just too late.

Sylvia Plath: October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963. Thirty years old.

[1](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvia-Plath)

[2](https://www.sparknotes.com/author/sylvia-plath/)

[3](https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/sylvia-plath)

[4](https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/plathbio.html)

[5](https://poets.org/poet/sylvia-plath)

[6](https://poetryarchive.org/poet/sylvia-plath/)

[7](https://mcgrath.nd.edu/assets/316752/biography_sylvia_plath.pdf)

[8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath)

[9](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath)