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 [|Image from http://feliciaatkinson.wordpress. com]  ||<  **Biography:**
 * ==Sylvia Plath  ==

Sylvia Plath was born in Jamiaca Plain, Massachusetts in 1932. In school she had straight A's and in 1950 went to Smith College on a scholarship. Sylvia began a journal which is what got her into poetry. She wrote articles for local newspapers like the //Daily Hampshire Gazette// and the //Springfield Union.// Then she applied to Harvard and did not get in she had a mental breakdown. Her junior year in college she had an attempted suicide by downing a whole bottle of sleeping pills. She crawled into a three-foot crawl space and had a sip of water and pills until the bottle was empty. She fell unconscious and after a twenty-four hour search she was found and sent to [|McLean Hospital] . After she recovered, her most famous and remembered poetry began. After years of therapy she wrote an autobiography, The Bell Jar. In 1954 she met Richard Sassoon who was her apparent "lover." She went to Cambridge, England to study more poetry. In 1956 she married [|Ted Hughes]. //The Colossus,// was her first book and was also published in England. Ted and Sylvia lived in Devon, England for two years and had one child together but then divorced. In 1962, she had little money, the flu and now two children. On February 11th, 1963 killed herself at the age of thirty. She fed her children then shut the kitchen door to possibly protect them, then filled the oven with gases and stuck her head in the oven. A few years later a book of poems she had worked on before her death, //Ariel,// was published. Two of the poems were edited by Ted Hughes. A week after she died she was buried in [|Yorkshire] . ||

Poetry links:
[|The Bell Jar by, Sylvia Plath] || <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Sylvia Plath's grave ||
 * * <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|Crossing The Water] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|Bitter Strawberries] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|Ariel] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|Death and Co.] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|The Bell Jar] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> (book) ||> <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[[image:http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060930187.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg width="191" height="274" link="http://www.buscolibrary.whitleynet.org/Teen%20Page.htm"]]

<span style="color: rgb(0,0,0);"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Explication:
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Explication of " <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">[|Bitter Stawberries] <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">" <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">In "Bittersweet Strawberries" by Sylvia Plath, a young girl is frightened about the upcoming war. She and her mother work in the strawberry feilds and the little girl listened to her mother and Mary talk about the Russian army. Sylvia Plath writes about how "the taste of the strawberries turned sour" (8) describe how the conversation turned in the wrong direction. To show the innocence of the men going to war the poem talks about how two children played tag and across the road hard-working men were hoeing the lettuce. Her mother says things like "we ought to have bombed them long ago" (21) and "bomb them off the map" (6) which intensifies the fright in the girl. The young girl, Nelda, has long blond braids and blue eyes giving the sense of innocence to her. She pleads for them to stop speaking about the war and asks why her mother has to talk about them in a bad way. Her mother sharply replies to not be afriad and continues working like nothing happened. The women stood revealing a "thin, commanding figure in faded dungarees" (29 and 30) and asked the small girl in a professional manner a question trying to take some of her innocence. Quietly they go back to work picking the strawberries. Some signifigant points and symbols in the stories is the subtle menotion of innocence. The draft for the war is sending young men to fight a dangerous battle. This portrays how quickly children are losing their childhood to adult activities. This poem is a sad story of war and purity and depicts the hard struggles of children at that time.

<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Steinberg, Peter K. __A celebration, this is.__ December 2007. 17 November 2008 < <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">>. <span style="color: rgb(255,15,0);"> <span style="color: rgb(0,0,0);"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Beckmann, Anja. __Sylvia Plath Homepage.__ April 16 2007. 17 November 2008 <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">http://www.sylviaplath.de/ <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">. <span style="color: rgb(255,15,0);">

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