A few years ago a friend sent me a photo of himself wearing a Sylvia Plath T-shirt. It was pale pink – the colour of the Smith College memorandum paper on which the poet drafted many of her poems – and printed with the iconic picture of Plath in side profile, wearing a white hairband. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
I am one of countless poets who developed an obsession with Sylvia Plath after being introduced to her work as a teenager, and her writing became a catalyst for my own. I recited her poems out loud in my bedroom, just as I would sing along to my favourite songs. The poems’ cadences sank into me, the way Plath sank into my own personal mythology, long before any other writers did. Beyond the power of her work, what Sylvia Plath represented to me is still hard to understand. On a personal level I felt a kinship with her because we had both lost parents as children (she, her father at eight; me, my mother at seven). We had both received sharp, early lessons in the savagery of the world. Such lessons are, of course, not unusual. Most teenagers, despite their backgrounds, have a sense of this savagery. Perhaps that’s why Plath’s work so often hits home in those years, when one is beginning to reckon with life’s difficulties and work out how, if, one might harness them.
