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=Sylvia Plath by Whitney White=

Sylvia Plath was a poet born on October 27th, 1932. She was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Sylvia was the daughter of two scholars Otto Emil Plath (who died of diabetes when Plath was only 8 years old), and Aurelia Schober Plath. Most of her whole life, she was depressed. A lot of her anxieties came from wanting to over-succeed and to excell in everything she did. This, along with her father's death, had a huge impact on her writing. The most literary productive years of her life were the two before she committed suicide on April 11th, 1963.

Themes of Plath's writing revolve mostly around deep, dark thoughts. Many of her poems are about the loss of her father. Another sad theme is about her divorce. She married a man named Ted Hughes, and they had two kids. She found one day that Ted had been having affairs, and she filed for a divorce. She had attempted suicide before this by overdosing on sleeping pills, and she tried again after by running her car off the road. Both attempts failed, and she wrote about them in her poems. Death is a recurring theme in her poems. She has the idea that everyday objects actually harbor the spector of death.

" Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call." -Sylvia Plath

During the time of Sylvia Plath's writing, women's rights were a big deal. The equity between man and woman was being fought for. Also, the image of women was being questioned. Women needed to have a perfect body and the perfect clothes and look great just for a man. One of her most famous poems, "Mirror", is about a woman coming to see her reflection everyday hoping for a better outcome each time, but it is still the same every time. Plath had the idea that women had to look a certain way just to please a man long enough to reproduce, and then her existance did not seem to have a point. Her poems indicate this point also.