Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and a poet of the naturalist movement.  Hardy was born in 1840 to a lower middle class family. His father was a stonemason.

 In the early age of his life , he was an architect.  Meanwhile he started writing poetry. At that time he became little success also. In 1847 he became a successful writer. Then he married his first wife Emma Gifford but she died in 1912. After her death Hardy published his first collection of poems “ Veteris Vestiglae Flammae” (Vestiges of an Old Flame) . After two years of time Hardy married for the second time. The name of his second wife was Florance Dugdale. 

Hardy wrote a number of novels which became very popular. Some of them are,

·         Madding crowd

·         The Return of the Native

·         The mayor of Caster bridge

·         Jude the obscure

                                                          

 At the age of 55, he returned to writing poetry. Most of his poetry were visionary. Some famous poems of him are,

·         Time’s Laughing Stocks

·         Satires of Circumstances

·         Moments of Vision

·         The man he killed

·         The oxen

Thomas Hardy died in 1928. After his death his second wife wrote Hardy’s biography.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born on 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Plath belongs to the 20^th century of poetry known as confessional poetry. She was known as a poet and a novelist. Her interest of writing started at an early age. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950 because of publishing large number of her works. Sylvia Plath at the end committed suicide after two previous attempts. At the third attempt she succeeded in killing herself. At the first two attempts she really did not want to die. She wanted also to live.

In the poem “Lady Lazarus” she mentioned “I have done it again” which means her previous attempts to die. She was caught between her attractions to life as well as to death.

Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes who was also a poet in 1956. It was a stormy relationship. In 1960, Plath published her first collection of poetry, “The Colossus” at England. And in the same year she gave a birth to their first child, a daughter and after two years later she had a son as the second child. But she was unfortunate to failing her marriage apart.

After Ted Hughes left her for another woman, she was in a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illnesses she wrote “The Bell Jar”, her only novel.  It is based on her life and deals with one young woman’s mental disorder. Plath was the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer prize in 1982.

On February 11, 1963 Sylvia Plath died  by committing suicide.