Sylvia Plath - why her poetry and life-story continue to be relevant even today?

In her poem, 'Lady Lazarus', Sylvia Plath writes, "Dying/Is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well." However, her first two suicide attempts were not successful.

- SATISH KUMAR SHARMA

At 20, she downed an overdose of sleeping pills after being rejected for a writing course at Harvard. She remained in a coma for two days but was saved and had to undergo psychiatric treatment, including electric shocks. The second time, she drove her car into a river but was rescued. Her third attempt was fatal.

Plath was 30 when she killed herself on 11 February 1963 by sticking her head into the kitchen oven and inhaling carbon monoxide at her London flat, where she lived with her two young children after separating from husband Ted Hughes in October 1962.

Hughes was a poet and Poet Laureate of the UK from 1984 to 1998. Their marriage of 1956 became strained because Plath had Bipolar Disorder, and marriage and motherhood did not let her breathe poetry - her oxygen. Hughes' affair with Assia Wevill, a married German Jewish woman, snapped the cord.

Plath wrote confessional poetry. Confessional poets bare their innermost emotions in their poems. Her contemporary but precursor Robert Lowell started the movement, but Plath took it to the pinnacle of popularity with poems like 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus', which are from her posthumously published anthology - 'Ariel'. She had already published poetry and a novel before her death.