Sylvia Plath would have been 88 today. Did we make her up inside our heads?

I knew Sylvia Plath and I would end up sharing a life-long bond the minute I read her for the first time. I must have been 17 or so. An age when I was starting to experience romance and poetry to their fullest.

Plath was anything but romantic. She was violent, brutal. Her words lashed out at me like a storm and left me bruised for life. If life was a long, dark, windowless, corridor that wound its way through chaotic mazes, her poetry was the energy that permeated those spaces, turning even her most chaotic experience into a magnificent beast.

“Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” she declared in one of her most haunting poems, “Daddy”. I wasn’t hurt that she called her father that. I was enamoured that she had the courage to do that. There was horror in her death. The fact that she put her head into a stove, inhaled the gas and ended it all, terrorised me when I was younger. But it turned her into some mythical creature, powerful in the violent way she chose to go.

I kept reading Plath’s poetry all through my life and as the years passed, more disturbing layers of meaning emerged, onion-like, stinging me with their might. Eventually, I ended up with an epigraph from her in my first book of poems.

October 27, 2018 would have been Sylvia Plath’s 88th birthday, if she had not killed herself. But her tragic life and imagination live on in the innumerable research articles, journals, anthologies and estate that survive after her. For me, the greatest gift of knowing her work perhaps culminated in an experience in New York, not too far from Boston, where she was born.

When I learnt that the New York Public Library (NYPL) and its archives had some of her notebooks and books she owned, I ensured I spent an afternoon there. Though the star of the day was the original manuscript of The Waste Land by TS Eliot, carefully encased in glass, I was ecstatic that I had a few hours to read and savour Plath’s own books. I was given a quiet corner in one of the most serene rooms in NYPL, a cradle where the book rested and a bean bag to turn the fragile pages of the book. So here I was, with nothing between Plath and me, except her words.

I first discovered her own copy of Eliot’s The Four Quartets with extensive and artfully handwritten annotations by her. The book, a gift from a friend, had a dedication, “A small addition, Sylvie, to your collection of ideas, lives, stories, and shrunken heads,” signed 1951.

As I sat there, dumbstruck and in awe, goosebumped, her rounded, neat handwriting came alive in her elaborate observations. She was a careful reader and student. Practically every sentence was underlined in black ink and notes hovered around the poems like eager flies.

Plath even annotated the opening lines of the poem with her own eloquent interpretations of time: “Time as progression, events a sequence of cause and effect… Time eternally present can’t bring back past.”

Her notebook was an interesting record of birthdays, important dates, random scribbles and drawings. It was heartening to see the attention she gave to such details. And for me, it somehow heightens the rage she felt against her marriage to Ted Hughes, which eventually drove to her suicide, and the helplessness we as readers, we experience. After all, she too, was only human, wanting a decent home and family and a happy life she hoped she would find, after moving to England, with Hughes. The little note book just reaffirmed her need to find a steady social circle, perhaps something she hoped would give her a sense of belonging in a new country.

Much of Plath’s correspondence has been anthologised and analysed, which illuminates our understanding of what was going on in her life prior to her death. A recent article in The Guardian reviews her letters written between 1956 and 1963. Of all the letters she wrote, it is believed that those addressed to her psychiatrist in America, Dr Ruth Beuscher, are the most revealing and disturbing. There, she recounts her miscarriage, physical abuse by Hughes a few days before that, his infidelity and so on.

We don’t know how much truth is there in her claim that she was abused, but we can safely assume there was violence and brutality of some sort. Psychological, if not physical, for certain.

“I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.”

This is what she says wryly and eerily in “Death & Co.” By now she has made a pact with death. But for the lovers of her verse, she has outlived the pact. “…brave love, dream/not of staunching such strict flame, but come,/ lean on to my wound; burn on, burn on.” (“Firesong”).

Sylvia Plath burns on.