Dying Is an Art Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath had an unimaginable talent but a great emptiness inside her soul. She is one of the greatest poetesses of the 1900s. During her short life gifted us wonderful poems that still move us today.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the U.S on October 27, 1932. At just eight years old she published her first poem in the Boston Herald and then in the following years she had other publications.
From the poem Lady Lazarus:
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.
The love for writing and the great intelligence of this girl (IQ 160) has already made her stand out at a young age.
It is as if this poet heard an instinctive voice within her that urged her to write. This is what happens to great talents … they follow a path that seems already marked by destiny.
Dying Is an Art Sylvia Plath
But fate also had a troubled life in store. Her great sensitivity opened the doors of magnificence in the literary field but also opened the abyss of depression.
Sylvia was like living flesh. Her emotions and feelings were amplified as she had no filters.
Constantly living on the edge between heaven and hell made the artist fall into a kind of paranoid limbo from which she was unable to get out.
There may be many factors that have made this problem worse. Her father Otto died when she was 18. She failed to meet her myth, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. You never know what can harm a sensitive soul.
The insatiable desire to be the best led her to be very hard and demanding on herself.
In 1956 Sylvia married the poet Ted Hughes whose writing she greatly admired. The two had a strange passion for astrology and the supernatural. They often played with ouija boards. There are those who say that this passion had opened a portal of negativity that added to the depressive crises of the poet it turned out to be a poisonous mix.
In 1960 she gave birth to her first daughter Frieda and a year after her pregnancy ended up in a miscarriage. This event also nourished her depression even more.
Sylvia Plath is known not only for her magnificent poems but also for her numerous suicide attempts and her tragic death.
In 1953 she attempted suicide by stuffing herself with her mother’s sleeping pills. A few years later she threw herself into a river with her car. But only in 1963 did she succeeds in her intent to abandon the earthly world.
Everything was meticulously planned. She asked the neighbor when he was leaving the house. She sealed the kitchen with tape and towels so that the gas leak did not reach the other rooms of the house. She told the nurse that she was helping her with her kids to arrive a little later. Then with no more hope in life, turned the knob, she put her head inside the gas oven, and let herself be suffocated slowly by the carbon monoxide.
This great talent of literature had decided to leave the world like this. She was found shortly after by the nurse who called for help, but it was too late.
The psychologic treatments, the electroshocks she had undergone in the past had not been able to close the trap door of the abyss.
Perhaps even her passion for calling spirits with ouija boards has allowed evil ancestral entities to speak directly to her unconscious. No one will ever really know what Sylvia Plath thought before she died on February 11, 1963 (aged 30) in London, England.
Dying Is an Art Sylvia Plath
If you are having suicidal thoughts or know someone who is we suggest following this link to find help:
College Suicide Prevention Guide
We made a song where death announces itself to a successful man before taking him away. Title Shiver by Edgar Allan Poets
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