I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
She studied with poet Robert Lowell in the late 1950’s. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She was married to poet Ted Huges and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
When Ted Hughes left her in 1962 for another woman, she went into a deep depression and wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar
On February 11, 1963, she wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
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 win a Pulitzer Prize after death.
Source: http://www.poets.org
- November 05, 2013 with 1 note
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