Sylvia Plath was a remarkable twentieth century American poet. Her poetry focused on depression, aspects on suicide, death, savage imagery, self-destruction and painful feelings of women. Plath attempts to exorcise the oppressive male figures that haunted her life served as one of the fundamental themes in her poetry.
             Her poetry is a good example on how "suffering and transformation could be within traditional poetic contexts" (Initiation p.142). She also believed that a poem "must give an expression to the poet's own anguish because suffering has become the central fact of historical and personal existence" (Initiation p.143). This is what she believed and how she dealt with her problems by expressing her feelings through poetry. Though what was expressed in her poems also portrayed her fate in suicide.
             Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father, Otto Plath was a German biology professor at Boston University. Her mother, Aurelia, was a high school English teacher, until she married and became a homemaker. When Sylvia was only eight, her father died from complications of undiagnosed diabetes, which also scarred her for life. At this same age she started her career as writer she published her first couplet in the Boston Sunday Herald, and since then has persistently worked on poetry and her writings.
             In high school, she was a remarkably intelligent, popular, student. She was the typical "Straight A's" girl. As a member of the National Honors Society, she received a scholarship to attend Smith College in 1950. While studying creative writing and graphic arts in her third year of college, she was a guest editor in Mademoiselle Magazine. Shortly after that, on August 24, 1953, because of extreme depression, she attempted suicide for the first time by taking a large dose of sleeping pills. She was later treat...