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