Skip to main content

A bit of a professional: Sylvia Plath

The following is a guest blog post by Katie Mikulka, Smith College '16 (American Studies & Archives). Originally published on the National Portrait Gallery's blog, facetoface, on 10 August 2015, I am very pleased to re-post the piece here and hope that by doing so there builds excitement about the forthcoming 2017-2018 exhibit.
Sylvia Plath's Royal typewriter
Photograph courtesy of Smith College / Samuel Masinter.

Perhaps one of the best known American poets of the 20th century, Sylvia Plath has captivated generation after generation of readers. But even the most dedicated of Plath fans might not know that the poet's career got an early start, at the age of only eight! On this day, August 10, in 1941, Sylvia Plath's first published poem was printed in a local Boston newspaper. She continued to publish work throughout high school, in popular magazines such as Seventeen, and while a student at Smith College.

When asked in a 1962 radio interview how she first began writing poetry, Plath had this to say:
I don't know what started me, I just wrote it from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional. Interview with Peter Orr, 1962
Photographs and objects from Plath's early life will be on display in an upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. One Life: Sylvia Plath will trace Plath's biography through photographs, self-portraits, manuscripts, and other objects. The exhibition will also explore how Plath constructed her identity throughout her lifetime. In her journals, Plath considers her place in literary history, ranking herself alongside other famous female poets and describes her belief that she might one day become "The Poetess of America." When asked by the interviewer, Peter Orr, what exactly a young poet writes about, Plath had this to say:
Nature, I think: birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are absolute gifts to the person who doesn't have any interior experience to write about. I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet. Interview with Peter Orr, 1962
As Plath grew up, both as a person and a poet, she turned to her own life as inspiration and subject matter for her poetry, the "interior experience" that she describes. As the interview concludes, Plath's describes the pleasure to be found in writing poetry:
Oh, satisfaction! I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Interview with Peter Orr, 1962
It seems that for Plath, living life and writing life were almost one in the same.

All quotations are taken from a 1962 interview with Peter Orr.
All links accessed 18 August & 10 September 2015.

You can read more on the exhibit in Dorothy Moss's 29 April 2015 blog post "Sylvia Plath: 'What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.'" and in "A New 'Portrait of Plath': Alumna's Typewriter Among Items in Smithsonian Exhibit" from Smith College's Grecourt Gate from 26 August 2015.

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last