Sylvia Plath

Nothing is real except the present and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I too will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.
It's sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.
If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?
Write about your own experience. By that experience someone else may be a bit richer some day. Read widely of others experiences in thought and action--stretch to others even though it hurts and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance! Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way--and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich continually evolving entity!
I will cultivate restraint. I will stop being a loud-mouthed puppy that falls all over people in a frantic effort to attract them. I want desperately to be liked. I have gone through a long period of awkward, self-conscious unpopularity. Although I could be called an extrovert now, there are still recurrent traces of my old inferiority complex. I put new people on a pedestal, worshipping them for their surprising kindness to me, for their benevolent notice.
And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments. Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale? Or the other brilliant women--neurotic? Was their writing sublimation (oh, horrible word!) of deep, basic desires? If only I knew. If only I knew how high I could set my goals, my requirements for my life! I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values. I am now at the nadir of my calculating powers.
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The Life and Works of Sylvia Plath
- 1932 - Sylvia Plath born (27 October) in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Aurelia Schober and Otto Emil Plath. Aurelia was first-generation American, Otto had emigrated to the US fromthe German-speaking Polish corridor as a young man. Aurelia Plath worked as a teacher and as a secretary. Otto Plath was Professor of Entomology at Boston University and an expert on bees.
- 1935 - Birth of Sylvia’s brother, Warren.
- 1939 - Outbreak of World War II.
- 1940 - Death of Otto Plath after complications arising from diabetes.
- 1941 - Pearl Harbor; US enters World War II.
- 1942 - Aurelia, Sylvia and Warren move to Wellesley, Massachusetts.
- 1945 - Atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. End of World War II.
- 1950–1951 - Plath attends Smith College, Northampton (majoring in English) on a scholarship granted by novelist Olive Higgins Prouty.
- 1950–1953 - Korean War.
- 1950–1954 - McCarthyism.
- 1953 -(Early January) Plath fractures her leg in a skiing accident. (June) Execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage. (Summer) Plath takes up a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine, New York. Returns home exhausted and close to breakdown, ECT administered, suicide attempt and hospitalization.
- 1954 - Post-World War II food rationing in Britain ends.
- 1955 - Graduates from Smith College summa cum laude and travels to England on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge.
- 1956 - (25 February) meets Ted Hughes at the launch party for a student magazine. (16 June) marries Ted Hughes in London. Honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain.
- 1957–1959 - Plath and Hughes in the US.
- 1957 - Plath teaches at Smith College.
- 1958 - Plath attends Robert Lowell’s writing workshop at Boston University alongside Anne Sexton, takes a secretarial post in a psychiatric clinic, enters therapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher.
- 1959 - Travel through the US and period at Yaddo, the writers’ colony. (December) Plath and Hughes return to live in England.
- 1960 - (April) Plath’s and Hughes’s daughter, Frieda, born in London. (31 October) Plath’s first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in the UK.
- 1961 - (February) Miscarriage and appen..omy. (March to May) Writing The Bell Jar. (Late August/early September) Plath, Hughes and Frieda move to North Tawton, Devon. Antinuclear demonstrations take place in London.
- 1962 - (January) a son, Nicholas, born in Devon. The Colossus published for the first time in the US (14 May). (19 August) ‘Three Women’ broadcast on BBC radio. (October) Plath and Hughes separate; Hughes leaves North Tawton. Cuban Missile Crisis. (December) Plath and children move to London.
- 1963 - (January) The Bell Jar published in London under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
(11 February 1963) Sylvia Plath dies by suicide.
- 1965 - (11 March) Ariel published in the UK.
- 1966 - (June) Ariel published in the US. (1 September) The Bell Jar published in the UK under Plath’s own name.
- 1971 - (14 April) The Bell Jar published in the US under Plath’s own name. Crossing the Water published (May UK/September US). Winter Trees published in the UK (September).
- 1972 - (September) Winter Trees published in the US.
- 1975 - (December) Letters Home published in the US.
- 1976 - (April) Letters Home published in the UK. The Bed Book (1959?) published.
- 1977 - Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams published in the UK.
- 1979 - Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams published in the US.
- 1981 - Collected Poems published.
- 1982 - Collected Poems awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
(The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill)
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