Written by Jacob Knolwes-Smith
Dying Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
from ‘Lady Lazarus’
“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963)
Tragedy. Tragedy is a word often associated with Sylvia Plath and, certainly, when she took her life in 1963 that was a tragedy but to call her life tragic is to ignore the almost palpably vibrant work that it produced. One reason for this association is the public obsession with literary biography (which we indulge here, of course) which means that people know more about the lives of Plath, and husband Ted Hughes, than they know, or would ever care to, about her poetry. Another reason for this is that, as the above quote indicates, Plath wrote about death and horror to a great extent and so her work, influenced by depression, comes full circle in the end.
