Program note:   

         Sylvia Plath, born in 1932 was a sensitive and intelligent writer. She excelled in school and was very successful and active. After losing a bout with depression in 1953, Plath almost killed herself by swallowing sleeping pills. After the experience of unhappy marriage, she was penniless and lived in London with her tow children. During the hardness of her life, she wrote heavily between four and eight in the morning. Suffering from mental illness, she viewed death as an escape from the sadism of life. On February 11, 1963, Plath chose to end her own life at the age of 30.

        For Sylvia Plath contains three movements; they are, in the order of movements, “The Sleepers”, “Burning the Letters”, and “Edge.” The titles are taken from the titles of her poems, and the music in each movement is related to each particular poem.

         Plath wrote the poem, Burning the Letters, in August 13, 1962, which is about six months before her death. The poem is furious and full of anger and rage. Few days before she wrote this poem, she found her husband, Ted Hughes (also a writer), had an affair, and she burned out boxes of Ted’s letters and drafts of poems. When I first got touched with Sylvia Plath’s poems, her powerful and strong character attracted and impressed me tremendously. I especially found this specific poem extremely powerful. Critics said that, for Plath, the letters are the material representations of human beings’ thoughts, and by burning them, she expressed that “the words always materialize the thoughts to an extent that the entirety of the original thought can not incarnate in the words.” To me the poem also shows her fiery emotion for fighting with her illness—the feeling of being unable to get herself out, and the urgency for her to express every emotion through words.