Paralytic: Poetry From The Brink Silvia Plath has always been famous. She was a very open poet who wrote with so much confession, she became almost like a soap opera. Her life was a constant bout with suicide and the readers loved to watch. After one of her first suicide attempts, which is included in The Bell Jar, a novel later written by Plath, she was admitted into McLean Hospital. The poem "Paralytic" more than likely came from her time there. It is a poem about a girl who is placed into a mental institution after attempting to commit suicide. The poem "Paralytic" goes as follows