The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Plath, Sylvia. “Full Fathom Five” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154287/full-fathom-five.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. As a young girl, Plath showed early literary talent – her poems were published in regional magazines and newspapers and her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor. She went on to attend Smith College, during which time she experienced her first depressive episodes. In 1956, Plath met fellow American poet, Ted Hughes, whom she married. Unfortunately, the marriage proved to be unhealthy and abusive – Hughes was involved in numerous affairs, and Plath confessed to her psychiatrist that he subjected her to psychological and physical abuse. She died in 1963 by suicide.

Today, Plath is best known for intensely personalized and lyrical confessional poetry. Her verse does not shy away from her own subjective and emotionally moving experiences that were still somewhat taboo in mid-century America: love, death, and mental illness. Her most famous poetry collections, including The Colossus and Ariel, subscribe to this highly confessional style of lyricism. Similarly, her only novel, The Bell Jar, is based on Plath’s own experiences towards the end of her time at Smith College – she depicts in striking detail the struggles her protagonist, Esther, faces in her battle with depression and the harrowing road to recovery. “Full Fathom Five,” which was published in The Colossus in 1960, takes a similarly personal and subjective tone. In the poem, Plath continues to contend with the family tragedy of her father’s death in 1940, an event that played a role in her struggles with mental illness and continued to haunt her writing, as evident in poems such as "Daddy" and "Electra on Azalea Path."

As a general note, poetic convention states that the speaker of a poem generally should not be conflated with the voice and views of the author of a poem. However, Plath’s intensely lyrical poetic voice and her penchant for highly personal subject matter pose an arguable exception to this poetic convention. Therefore, throughout this study guide, the speaker of the poem will be referred to as “Plath” and equated to the poet herself, rather than as “the speaker.”