I am putting a page about Sylvia Plath here. She needs to be read, she needs to be heard, even if it is only posthumously. She has given me an outlet many times by speaking the words that I can't quite grab for myself. She gave me a voice at times. Even if my journal was the only one to recieve that voice.
Some say that she died an untimely . People say that quite a lot about s. First off: who is it to say that it was untimely? And second: she was in so much pain, and would only experience more pain by living. People today scoff at her whining, but think about it, she died in 1963. Prozac wasn't even thought of then. Half the medications used today to treat mental illness weren't available yet. There has been vast improvements in electroconvulsive therapy since Sylvia had it done. Therapy was mainly Fruedian, and while that type of therapy has its benefits, it is not helpful for all people. The resources available to people like me today just were not available in the '50's and '60's. How can we fault her? yes she had children, but would her chilodren have benefited from seeing their mother being taken in and out of mental institutions her whole life? Probably not. The fact is this: she . It's over and done with. who are we to judge, almost forty years later?
To me, her words are remarkable. She was willing to write about topics that wouldn't be dealt with openly for years. and she was a female A female in the '50's. If you think women have inequality now, think about forty and fifty years ago. Yet she got her voice heard.
Why? Because her words are packed with power. They do not skirt around a subject. They cut to the point, and often cut to your heart in the process. She deals with subjects that many writers shied away from. still isn't a comfortable topic, yet many of her poems dealth with it honestly. She expressed anger in general, which was unheard of in females in that time period. She also expressed anger at her father and her husband, which caused many people to turn away from her in the literary sense.
And yet, it is now 2002, almost forty years after her , and she is still read. The Bell Jar is a popular novel. Her Collected Poems, published after her , won the Pulitzer Prize. Numerous biographies have been written, countless commentaries. She is not going to go away. She had something to say, and it will be said. That is a quality that I strongly admire.
Poppies in July poem