344 PLA TH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY

and Times, translated by George Rosen (1947; 2d rev. ed.

1957), and Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of
Quantum Mechanics (1966). For a serious appraisal of
Planck’s work the reader should also consult the writings in
professional journals, especially those of Martin J. Klein of
Yale University, as well as the obituary notices by Max Born
in the Royal Society of London, Obituary Notices of Fellows
of the Royal Society, vol. 6 (1948-1949). 䡺

Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), poet and novelist, ex-
plored her obsessions with death, self, and nature in
works that expressed her ambivalent attitudes
toward the universe.

S ylvia Plath was born in Boston’s Memorial Hospital

on October 27, 1932, to Aurelia and Otto Plath. Otto,
who was a biology professor and a well-respected
authority on entomology at Boston University, would later
figure as a major image of persecution in his daughter’s best
known poems—‘‘Daddy,’’ ‘‘The Colossus,’’ and ‘‘Lady Laz-
arus.’’ His sudden death, eight years after Sylvia’s birth,
plunged the sensitive child into an abyss of grief, guilt, and
angry despair which would haunt her for life and provide
her poetry with the central motifs and tragic dimensions that
characterize it. In September 1950 Plath entered Smith College in
Although she promised never to speak to God again Northhampton on a scholarship. There she once again
after the death of her father, Plath, on the surface at least, excelled academically and socially. Dubbed the golden girl
gave the appearance of being a socially well-adjusted child by teachers and peers, she planned diligently for her writing
who excelled in every undertaking, dazzling her teachers in career. She filled notebooks with stories, villanelles, son-
the Winthrop public school system and earning straight A’s nets, and rondels, shaping her poems with studious preci-
for her superior academic skills and writing abilities. She sion and winning many awards.
was just eight and a half when her first poem was published In August 1952 she won Mademoiselle’s fiction con-
in the Boston Sunday Herald. test, earning her a guest editorship at the magazine for June
Plath lived in Winthrop with her mother and younger 1953. Her experiences in New York City were demoralizing
brother, Warren, until 1942, when Aurelia Plath purchased and later became the basis for her novel The Bell Jar (1963).
a house in Wellesley. These early years in Winthrop pro- Upon her return home Plath, depressed and in conflict with
vided the poet with her powerful awareness of the beauty her hard-won image as the All-American girl, suffered a
and terror of nature and instilled in her an abiding love and serious mental breakdown, attempted suicide, and was
fear of the ocean, which she envisioned as female: given shock treatments. In February 1953 she had recovered
enough to return to Smith. She was graduated summa cum
Like a deep woman, it hid a good deal; laude and won a Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge, where
it had many faces, many delicate terrible veils. she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes. They
. . . if it could court, it could also kill. were married June 16, 1956, in London.
After earning her graduate degree Plath returned to
Thus, even then, Plath was expressing her antithetical
America to accept a teaching position at Smith for the aca-
attitudes toward existence, embracing life and rejecting it
demic term 1957-1958. She quit after a year to devote full
simultaneously.
time to her writing. For a while she attended Robert Lowell’s
Wellesley, likewise, influenced Plath’s life and values. poetry seminar, where she met Anne Sexton. Sexton’s and
It was a middle-class, highly respectable, educational com- Lowell’s influences were decisive for her poetic develop-
munity whose attitudes were at first accepted wholeheart- ment. Both poets opened up for her very private and taboo
edly by the young idealistic girl who was beginning to have subjects and introduced her to new kinds of emotional and
her poems and stories published in Seventeen magazine. psychological depths.
Her first story, ‘‘And Summer Will Not Come Again,’’ ap-
peared in August 1950.
Volume 12 P L AT O 345
Plath and her husband were invited as writers-in-resi- again,
dence to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where they lived and The long wait for the angel
worked for two months. It was here that Plath completed For that rare, random descent.
many of the poems collected in The Colossus, her first
volume, published in 1960, the year her first child— Despite this sense of possible redemption, Plath could
Frieda—was born. Another child, Nicholas, was born two not escape the tragedy that invaded and overwhelmed her
years later. personal life. By February 1963 her marriage had ended;
she was ill and living on the edge of another breakdown
The Colossus was praised by critics for its ‘‘fine craft,’’ while caring for two small children in a cramped flat in
‘‘fastidious vocabulary,’’ ‘‘potent symbolism,’’ and London ravaged by the coldest winter in decades. On Mon-
‘‘brooding sense of danger and lurking horror’’ at man’s day, February 11, she killed herself. The last gesture she
place in the universe. But it was criticized for its absence of made was to leave her children two mugs of milk and a
a personal voice, ‘‘its elaborate checks and courtesies,’’ and plate of buttered bread.
its ‘‘maddening docility and deflections.’’
Not until ‘‘Three Women: A Monologue for Three Further Reading
Voices’’ (1962)—a radio play which was considered by
A good biography of Plath is Edward Butscher’s Sylvia Plath:
some critics to be her transitional, formative work—would Method and Madness (1976). Other books of interest are
she begin to free her style and write more spontaneous, less Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Plath (1975);
narrative, less expository poetry. ‘‘Three Women’’ fore- The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982); Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of
shadows some of Plath’s later poetry in that its structure is Initiation by Jon Rosenblatt (1979); Plath’s Incarnations by
dramatic and expressive of those highly personal themes Lynda Bundtzen (1983); A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of
that mark her work. Sylvia Plath by Nancy Hunter Steiner (1973); Sylvia Plath and
Ted Hughes by Margaret Dickie Uroff (1980); Sylvia Plath by
As it developed, her poetry became more autobio- Caroline King Barnard (1978); Plath: Poetry and Existence by
graphical and private in imagery. Almost all the poems in David Holbrook (1976); and The Art of Plath: A Symposium,
Ariel (1965), considered her finest work and written during edited by Charles Newman (1970). 䡺
the last few months of her life, are personal testimonies to
her angers, insecurities, fears, and overwhelming sense of
loneliness and death. At last she had found the voice that
had for so long eluded her.
Plato
Peel off the napkin
The Greek philosopher Plato (428-347 B.C.) founded
O my enemy.
Do I terrify? the Academy, one of the great philosophical schools
of antiquity. His thought had enormous impact on
Not surprisingly, that voice offended many people for
the development of Western philosophy.
its unflinching directness and use of startling metaphors. In
‘‘Lady Lazarus’’ her father, ‘‘Herr Doktor,’’ is compared to a
Nazi scientist: ‘‘Herr Enemy.’’ In ‘‘Daddy’’ dead Otto be-
comes a ‘‘fascist, a brute chuffing me off like a Jew/A Jew to
Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.’’
Violent and frighteningly vivid in its depiction of sui-
cide, death, mutilation, and brutality, Ariel shocked critics
P lato was born in Athens, the son of Ariston and
Perictione, both of Athenian aristocratic ancestry. He
lived his whole life in Athens although he traveled to
Sicily and southern Italy on several occasions, and one story
says he traveled to Egypt. Little is known of his early years,
and induced in its creator a powerful new sense of self. In but he was given the finest education Athens had to offer the
his introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell described that new scions of its noble families, and he devoted his considerable
self as ‘‘something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly cre- talents to politics and the writing of tragedy and other forms
ated . . . hardly a person . . . but one of those superreal, of poetry. His acquaintance with Socrates altered the course
hynotic, great classical heroines. . . .’’ of his life. The compelling power which Socrates’s methods
In later poetry published posthumously in Crossing The and arguments had over the minds of the youth of Athens
Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1971) this new self was able gripped Plato as firmly as it did so many others, and he
to voice its long-suppressed rage over ‘‘years of doubleness, became a close associate of Socrates.
smiles, and compromise.’’ The end of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.) left Plato
Ironically, although Plath is often regarded by critics as in an irreconcilable position. His uncle, Critias, was the
the poet of death, her final poems, which deal with self and leader of the Thirty Tyrants who were installed in power by
how self goes about creating and transcending itself in an the victorious Spartans. One means of perpetuating them-
irrational, destructive, materialistic world, clearly express selves in power was to implicate as many Athenians as
her yearning for faith in the healing self-transforming pow- possible in their atrocious acts. Thus Socrates, as we learn in
ers of art. Plato’s Apology, was ordered to arrest a man and bring him
to Athens from Salamis for execution. When the great
Miracles occur, teacher refused, his life was in jeopardy, and he was proba-
If you care to call those spasmodic bly saved only by the overthrow of the Thirty and the
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun reestablishment of the democracy.