I spent my teens marinated in Plath's poetry (there's a school of thought, not a very honourable one, that this is evidence that I was a slightly morbid teenage girl trapped in the body of a slightly morbid teenage boy). I came to her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar late – and it seemed to me astonishing. It was as if it had been written by a different Sylvia Plath: one who, of course, had also been through electroconvulsive therapy, and who had an uneasy relationship with day-to-day life. But The Bell Jar had a sort of cool jauntiness to it. It looked at the world, whereas her poetry, for the most part, looked inward. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (radio play; broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation in 1962; limited edition), Turret Books, 1968. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. Haberkamp, Frederike, Sylvia Plath: The Poetics of Beekeeping, International Specialised Book Services, 1997. Hers was an epitome of standard-issue 50s white, middle class American childhood, the kind of supposedly idyllic upbringing which no small number of people still remember today in a glowing, nostalgic haze. In Plath’s excavations of the identities that she cultivated herself and those she had pushed upon her, she gazed with radical intensity at America’s patriarchal social fictions, and the violence and entitlement that lay beneath them. The collage above from 1960 presents us with the kind of layered, cut-up, hybrid text that William Burroughs had begun experimenting with not long before. You can see more highlights from the Plath exhibit, “One Life: Sylvia Plath,” at the National Portrait Gallery. Also featured are Plath’s family photos, books, letters, her typewriter—and, in general, several more dimensions of her life than most of us know.

Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9038 Ocr_module_version 0.0.20 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1200515 Openlibrary_editionAxelrod, Steven Gould, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1990. To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: "I have a visual imagination." But what's so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof. Observer, June 1, 1986; February 18, 1996; March 19, 2000, Kate Kellaway, "The Poet Who Died So Well," p. 21.

The Colossus, Heinemann (London, England), 1960, published as The Colossus and Other Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1962. Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996. Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) — beloved poet, lover of the world, repressed “addict of experience”, steamy romancer, editorial party girl— was among that small and special coterie of creators with surprising semi-secret talents in a medium radically different from that of their primary cultural acclaim. Though her strikingly deft sketches and drawings have been previously exhibited, they are now collected with more depth and breadth in Sylvia Plath: Drawings ( public library) — an enthralling portfolio of pen-and-ink illustrations amidst a context of the poet’s letters and diary entries, edited by the poet’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, for whom Plath wrote her two little-known and lovely children’s books.

Drawings, Sketches, & Incomplete Works

The exhibition, the National Portrait Gallery writes, “reveals how Plath shaped her identity visually as she came of age as a writer in the 1950s.” Unsurprisingly, her most frequent subject is herself. Her visual art, like her poetry, notes Mental Floss, “is often preoccupied with themes of self-identity.” But as in her eloquently-written letters and journals, as well as her published literary work, she is never one self, but many—and not all of them variations on the sly, yet brooding intellectual we see staring out at us from the well-known photographs. The letters also include Plath encouraging the then mostly unknown Hughes to enter the prestigious Harper’s poetry contest. When Hughes went on to win the competition in 1957, with a collection that included The Hawk in the Rain, it helped launch his career.

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1981, Denis Donoghue, "You Could Say She Had a Calling for Death," p. 1; August 27, 1989, Robert Pinsky, review of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, p. 11; November 5, 2000, Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," p. 10.