“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”
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Sylvia Plath, not only a precocious poet and writer of essays, short stories, and children’s stories but also an artist working in pen and ink, committed suicide by gas in 1963 at the age of thirty-one, just a month after the publication of her novel, The Bell Jar, under the alias Victoria Lucas. This semi-autobiographical novel depicts the depression she suffered in the early 1950s and which, after a suicide attempt in her twenties, led her to a mental institution. She would never recover from the condition, which she discussed in her poems and diary entries. Using the theoretical tools developed by Franz Kaltenbeck in his book L’écriture mélancolique, this essay will examine her melancholy as expressed in her texts and her writing style while attempting to identify its distinctive characteristics, especially in her later poems.
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