Four Lessons in Songwriting From Sylvia Plath

By 1950, fresh out of high school, young Sylvia Plath had published her work in magazines read by thousands of people all over America.

By 1953, she’d made her first documented suicide attempt.

By the time she took her own life at age thirty, Plath had finished a surprising amount of fiction and poetry. At an age when most poets are just beginning to find their feet, she’d already gouged a legacy for herself out of the history of English literature. Her works are still read, discussed, and debated today.

The poet who longed to disintegrate

Plath’s poetry teems with haunting and sometimes violent imagery, and reveals a long-standing preoccupation with death.

Plath is now considered a confessional poet, as she often spills personal details about her life through her poems: her disintegrating marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes; her troubled relationship with her parents; and her decades-long war with depression. For years, Plath’s poems repeatedly explored the atrocities of World War II, and reflected a troubling urge to self-destruct.

In happier moments, though, Plath wrote pieces about summer festivals. About fresh, delicious melons. And even when the subject of a poem was dark, Plath’s writing displayed a crisp, high-definition sensitivity to the sensory world.

Plath didn’t just see the world; she seemed to feel it. It’s as though her nerve endings grew right out of her skin like threads — weaving themselves into vases, vining up flower stems. Plath could stare deeply at a tree, taking tactile pleasure in its knobs and knots and rough-textured bark. But when the tree limb cracked, Plath cracked too.

As lyricists and songwriters, we share a literary heritage with poets like Plath. No doubt we can learn a lot from this great writer — both from her virtues and from the tragic elements of her life.

Here are four insights I’ve gained by reading Sylvia Plath’s Complete Poems and studying her life story.

1. Finish the songs you start

By the time of her death, on 11 February 1963 Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. — From Ted Hughes’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath

Many songwriters struggle to finish songs. In honor of that nearly universal challenge, I named this site song written, and gave it the tagline “Finish the songs you start.”

Many songwriters hoard grand ideas, good lines, and promising bits of melody — but then have trouble seeing any of those ideas through to completion.

Songs tend to get steeply difficult somewhere in the middle of the writing process. The middle is when gaps in our skills surface to haunt us, and it often becomes easier to give up than to continue.

No doubt Sylvia Plath felt this urge to give up on a poem many times, but she resisted. Plath didn’t walk away from her own works. If she’d started a piece in earnest, she stubbornly saw it through as best she could. Maybe the work didn’t turn out quite the way she’d hoped, but still she labored to nudge the piece toward some kind of final form.

By stubbornly finishing her works, even when it stretched her abilities, Plath built her skill up a little at a time, poem after poem.

Leaving songs unfinished quickly becomes a habit. Make a habit of completing them instead — even if it’s just for the experience of stretching yourself.

The song might not always go smoothly; that’s natural. Stay with it. This is a long-term game. Each song is simply practice for the next, but only if you see it all the way through the parts you find difficult.

Finish the songs you start.

2. Push yourself

The end product for [Sylvia] was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. — From Ted Hughes’s introduction to the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath

Plath seemed to approach writing like a workout, or a puzzle. She’d explore its problems. She’d write a piece and rewrite it and then rewrite it yet again; she’d stretch herself until exhausted — then do it all over again the next day. She seemed to focus deeply on the process of writing, rather than just focusing on the finished product..

She began this habit of pushing herself as a preteen. As a girl, Plath already kept a journal, read poetry, and experimented with demanding poetic forms like the villanelle — a form that even expert poets find daunting.

Plath’s earlier works were mostly imitative exercises based on poets that Plath admired, like Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Through structural challenges, lots of reading, and imitative exercises based on model poets, Plath gradually got better and better at writing verse.

As songwriters we can learn a lot from Plath’s artisanal approach. There’s always room to improve your powers of description, your command of rhyme, your lyric structuring skills, and any one of the dozens of other skills that songwriting calls for.

Instead of worrying about the finished product of a song, focus on the actual process of writing. Work on honing and refining your skills, and make that the primary goal.

If you end up liking the song you wrote, great! But the finished product is less important in the long run; the process of improving your skills is the real lasting prize.

If the song turns out sort of poorly but you learned something by composing it, that’s still a win.

When it comes to songwriting, worry as much about the process as you do about the product.

3. Stay determined in the face of adversity and rejection

By age 18, young Plath was already a serious writer. She’d submitted forty-five pieces to Seventeen magazine — and, in return, Seventeen had mailed back forty-five rejection slips.

But Plath persisted, and the 46th time was a charm. At age 18, Syliva finally got one of her short stories published in the August 1950 issue of Seventeen magazine. With that first small success, the floodgates had opened.

Plath continued to work hard at writing as she attended college, and she rapidly picked up momentum. Within a few years she’d published more stories in national magazines, won Mademoiselle’s fiction contest, won two Smith college poetry prizes, and gotten her poems printed in Harper’s.

I believe Plath became a great poet in part because she had the patience to weather forty-five rejection letters without giving up. Plath was still young when she first began to taste success, but to dismiss Plath’s achievement as mere precociousness or “talent” doesn’t do her justice.

Plath’s poetry didn’t come easily to her; it’s not something she was born with. It was the result of a lot of hard work, humility, and deliberate practice. Plath put herself out there, experienced rejection, learned from it, rose to it, and eventually enjoyed some fruit for her long labors.

You may find yourself in Sylvia’s shoes from time to time. The world’s not always going to applaud your efforts as a songwriter or artist. Sometimes you’ve just got to take your lumps, learn everything you can from the experience, and continue on.

4. There’s no romance in being a “tortured genius”

Given that Plath took her own life, I think now is a good time to point out an unhealthy notion that I often find among young artistic types.

Visual artists, poets, musicians, actors, and songwriters alike seem to believe that suffering somehow enhances creative work. They seem to believe that self-destruction and brilliance go hand-in-hand.

Some would point at Plath’s story and say, “See? Her depression fueled her work, and she was brilliant because of it.” But when I meditate on Plath’s life, I’d say she pushed on to brilliance in spite of her suffering, not because of it.

Plath was unable to find effective treatments for her mental illness in her own time, and ultimately she cut her own success short by taking her own life. Her two very young children had to grow up without a mother. Her Pulitzer prize — the one she never knew she’d won — had to be awarded posthumously.

Let’s not romanticize that. Let’s recognize it for what it is: a tragedy that cut the life of a master poet short.

It’s especially sad to think that if Plath had access to the modern mental health services and treatments available today, she might have survived that final depressive episode and lived long enough to see her children grow up.

Plath was brilliant, yes, but just think what she could have created if she’d continued practicing her craft for forty more years.

Although Plath’s depression certainly influenced her poetry and prose, I’m not convinced that her depression in any way truly nourished her love of language.

I’m not convinced that any artist has to suffer for her art. Some of the closest people in my life are artists, poets, and songwriters who’ve been treated for depression and anxiety — and find that treating these ills gives them more energy and enthusiasm for the ups and downs of creative work.

Let’s not glamorize self-destructive tendencies. When you take good care of yourself physically and mentally, your creative work can only benefit.

Plath’s Legacy

Plath is a heavyweight in the literary world. Her works are still read, discussed, and appreciated today.

It’s tempting to say the work of a “genius” like Sylvia is due to inborn talent, but Plath worked stubbornly hard at her craft. She didn’t pick up a pen and immediately start dashing off masterpieces; instead she worked to build up her writing skills for years.

Plath endured forty-five rejection slips from the editors of Seventeen magazine, but kept patiently lettering envelopes and offering her stories anyway, week after week.

That toughness and discipline paid off. Plath broke through. She left a legacy.

The idea of inspiration is fetishized in our culture, but the truth is that most “inspired” works of art come after a very, very long period of disciplined training, practice, and preparation. Plath’s a great example of that.

I’m saddened by Sylvia’s early death, but her commitment to the written word is inspiring — and proves that hard work can indeed make you a better writer.

Let’s learn from that, so that Sylvia Plath’s best qualities can live on.

Sources and Further Reading

• Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems
• Plath’s biography page on The Academy of American Poets’s website
• Plath’s biography page on the Poetry Foundation’s website
• Anne Stevenson’s “Plath, Sylvia” entry in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.