Sylvia Plath During The Great Depression

According to dictionary.com therapy is “the treatment of disease or disorders, as by some remedial, rehabilitating, or curative process” (The Dictionary). Literature can be a form of therapy, whether a person is writing the piece or reading it. It is something people can either relate to or use as a way of escaping the everyday, exhausting feelings. Authors transport the reader to another world where they don’t have to think about their lives. Poems can often be the best type of literature for therapy because they are often short and concise, which leaves the interpretation up to the reader. With a limited amount of words to tell the story and express the message, poets know exactly what they are writing about. Each word is chosen very

Poems leave it all up to interpretation; the reader can decide what they think or feel about it. Poets often have a connection or reason to write poetry; the topic they’re writing about is usually something they can strongly relate to. In order to know what the poet is writing about, we have to look into their background and how they grew up. Sylvia Plath grew up in the 1930s, around the time of the Great Depression. Reflecting on how she grew up, she wrote about the struggles of depression. Plath grew up around the time where everyone was losing their jobs and money. The Great Depression was unaccommodating for Plath and her mother. Pay scales were especially lowered for women and Plath didn’t have a father to help pay for their cost of living (“Women, Impact”). Later, after the birth of her two children, Plath struggled from near poverty again. She didn’t have an established job or a constant source of income, she only had her poetry, which was rarely published. She struggled to feed her children and keep them content. Her emotions suffered and showed in her poetry. She wrote her piece Lady Lazarus about her attempts of suicide. Trying to cope through her writing, Plath continued to suffer from

She later said that his death was the reason for her emotional turmoil in her adult years. Her mother was an English teacher and she encouraged Plath to write. Plath published her first piece in the newspaper around the time her father died (“Sylvia Plath.” 1046-1047). Years later, she attended Smith College and her junior year she won a prize from the Mademoiselle magazine and spent that summer as the guest editor in the magazine’s New York office (Lague 1148). At the end of the summer, Plath attempted suicide and got psychiatric treatment and electroshock therapy, this event inspired her piece The Bell Jar, which was published in 1963. Determined to get her work published, Plath went through 45 rejection slips before getting one of her pieces published. Her earlier pieces were conservative and optimistic compared to her later pieces. In 1955, she got a grant to study at Cambridge University. This is where she met the young poet, Ted Hughes, who she married in 1956. The couple moved to England after two years. Plath’s life seemed ideal on the outside; she had a house, a husband that respected her writing, published her first book The Colossus, and had her first child in the same year. She wrote Morning Song about the birth of her second child and the first night they spent together (1148). However, Plath’s life was far from