DOCSLIB.ORG

Sylvia Plath: an Overview

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Sylvia Plath: an Overview Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, {Bi-Monthly}, ISSN2249-9598, Volume-III, Issue-IV, July-Aug 2013 Sylvia Plath: An overview Neetu Dabas Email id- [email protected] Abstract The paper shows the inner dynamism through the analysis of few poems. Sylvia Plath traces the role of masculine in the society in many of her works. This paper explores the literary life and thoughts of an exceptional American woman, writer, novelist and poetess etc. Sylvia Plath (1932 –1963) became a rich and attractive target for critics and analysis of her own life and literary works. The paper also explores the image of men as dominating characters at that age. They are having godly images, satanic evil portrait, solemn and mean. The paper describes her state of mind with the help of her work “Daddy” and “The Bell Jar”. KEYWORDS: psychic reality, Sylvia Plath, feminism, poetry analysis. Introduction In this paper, few poems are analyzed as a feminine reality of a poet. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. She lived with her parents Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath and later her brother Warren in the suburbs of Boston (Steinberg). She was very delighted to be a ‘Smith Girl’ and tried her best to shine in all of her classes. Plath published her first poem at eight years old and was very intelligent. She was married to the English poet Ted Hughes, and together they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath committed suicide in London in 1963, and was buried in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The poetry and writings of Sylvia Plath occupy a special position in American poetry due to its nature, topics, treatment and imagery. Her life and bitter experiences have affected her poetry and the presentation of her material. She is widely recognised as one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. On the morning of 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London. In this paper I will take the different approach from previous studies. I will connect the poems with Plath’s psychic reality. At the time of her death, she was known as the author of a first, moderately well received book of poems “The Colossus (1960)”. In addition, she had recently published a novel, “The Bell Jar (1963)”, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She had published a number of prose stories and sketches in various magazines and journals. I practice all my moves I memorize their stupid rules I make myself their friend I’ll show them just how far I can bend www.oiirj.org Impact Factor - 2.089[ISRA JIF] Page 264 Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, {Bi-Monthly}, ISSN2249-9598, Volume-III, Issue-IV, July-Aug 2013 She boarded on a master’s degree course at Newnham College, Cambridge. At a party in Cambridge in February 1956, she met the young English poet Ted Hughes. The couple married within four months of their first meeting, in a ceremony that took place in London on 16 June 1956. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is mainly about 20th century feminism and women’s social injustices. The poem “Daddy” criticises the male aggression and depicts men being responsible for all the social injustices. The most frank announcement comes in "Daddy" when she out cried: Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through The more vital turn in her relationship with her father and males in common, which reflects the acute and extreme unstable emotional state of Sylvia Plath is when she wrote in "Daddy": Daddy, I have had to kill you The Bell Jar was Sylvia Plath’s most commendable and only novel. The book references too many real people, and dolorous events in Plath’s life. “The Bell Jar ” is the story, in other words, from behind the electroconvulsive shock treatment. It dramatizes the decisive event of her adult life, which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight. Further, the symbolic use of shadow in "Daddy" and "the Colossus" represented the fears of being or living in the shadow of the empowered by society males, who are the father and the husband in Sylvia's case. Plath does not enjoy the limitations of being a woman. Being a woman to Plath character meant being a slave. In the years Plath lived, women were inferior to men. The male’s job was to bring home the money, and the female’s role was to take care of their families, complete house duties, and cook. They weren't allowed to work, and if they were allowed, their husbands would receive their paychecks. Poetry is just the evidence of life. Leonard Cohen once said “if your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”As Sylvia Plath’s life burned into a heap of dust, her poetry grew and bloomed. In the years before, her death, her most troubles period, Plath penned three of her most well-known poems, “Daddy”, “Lady, Lazarus” and “Tulips” all three illustrating the misery of depression. Her Posthumously-released novel, The Bell Jar, also deals with extended bleakness and its poverty of the soul. She was bipolar, her depression, and self image were the main ingredients of her poetry and suicide. Her first suicide attempt was as a junior in college, after being rejected by Harvard college. She was found after three days, it was a miracle she was still alive, and spent six months in psychiatric care. Unfortunately, her second suicide was a success on February 11, 1963. Plath’s poetry and prose reflect on her prolonged battle against despair, bringing to life her personal struggles as an artist and as a woman. Although Plath’s life ended with tragedy, her writings continue to be seen a culturally significant commentary on gender roles. Plath strove in life to have the ability to be more than just a wife and mother and to succeed through her creative endeavors. Although in the end, Sylvia Plath could not endure the www.oiirj.org Impact Factor - 2.089[ISRA JIF] Page 265 Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, {Bi-Monthly}, ISSN2249-9598, Volume-III, Issue-IV, July-Aug 2013 pain of her distress, choosing to end her own life, she live on a everlasting on her many dedicated readers and followers. After all this she is able to come alive in her writing and truly make a significant difference in the world through her self-expression and aspiring goals to be significant distinctiveness civilization. Conclusion This paper describes the mental conflict of a fabulous writer, poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath. She makes a significant difference throughout the world with her writings and works. But she cannot afford the ways and custom of life regarding feminism. Her works represented the fears of being or living in the shadow of the empowered by society males, who are the father and the husband in Sylvia's case. Being a woman to Plath character meant being a slave . She also can’t tolerate the death of her father and her relation with her husband. Though she takes her life in the state of confusion and stress over her mind, she is able to come alive in her writing and truly make a significant difference in the world through her self-expression and aspiring goals REFERENCES Becker, Jillian. Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. New York: St. Martin's, 2002. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. New York: Longman, 2001. British Literary Biographers 155. Detroit: Gale Group, 1995. 128-133. Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Stroud, Eng.: Sutton, 2003. Hunt, Olivia "Sylvia Plath Poem: Daddy." Research Paper Writing Service. 12. May 2008. Web. 28. February. 2012.<http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/103421/poetry/sylvia_plat h_poem_daddy.html International Information Programs department, U.S.A. Iowa Review, 8 (1): 104-15 Kendall, T. (2001) Sylvia Plath A Critical Study. New York: Farber and Farber. Maple, Jeni (2009). The Intersection of Feminism and Disability Theory in Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary, Journal For Sylvia Plath Studies, 2 (1): 78-102. Plath Sylvia. The Bell Jar . London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Print Plath, S. (1992) The Collected Poems, New York: Harper Perennial. Plath, Sylvia "Daddy." N.P. 14. Dec. 2007. Web. 28. Feb. 2012. <http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Daddy > Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1971. Print. Serafin, Steven, ed. "Ian Hamilton." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth- Century. ---. Selected Poems. Ted Hughes, ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, paper presented to UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles. Uroff M. D. (1977). Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration, Vanspanckeren K. (2002). USA literature in Brief, paper presented to Wagner-Martin L. (2008). Sylvia Plath, a Literary Life , 10th ed., London: Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. London, 1988. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. www.oiirj.org Impact Factor - 2.089[ISRA JIF] Page 266 .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman's Dream Songs
    Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman’s Dream Songs ANDREW GROSS . Jews, who have changed much in the course of history, are certainly no race, [but] the anti‐Semites in a way are a race, because they always use the same slogans, display the same attitudes, indeed almost look alike. —Max Horkheimer1 John Berryman’s “The Imaginary Jew,” published in the Kenyon Review of 1945, is in some ways a rather programmatic account of one man’s conversion from parlor anti‐ Semitism to a feeling of solidarity with Jews. The climax occurs when a bigot accuses the narrator of being Jewish in order to discredit him in an argument over Roosevelt’s foreign policy prior to the American entry into World War II. The accusation completely unnerves the narrator in ways he does not immediately understand, and he is shocked to see that it discredits him in the eyes of the crowd, which has assembled at Union Square to hear impromptu debates. Later, after leaving the scene of his embarrassment, he decides to lay claim to this mistaken, or imaginary, identity, and comes to the following conclusion about the nature of prejudice: “My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.”2 The story garnered some attention when it appeared in 1945.
    [Show full text]
  • Double Image : the Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters
    Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. Double Image: The Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters. .A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University Helen Jacqueline Cain 2002 II CONTENTS Abstract................................................ .iii Acknowledgements ....................................... .iv Introduction.............................................. 1 Chapter One -Ted Hughes on Trial. ......................... 10 Chapter Two - The Structure of Birthday Letters. ...............22 Chapter Three - Delivered of Yourself........................ .40 Chapter Four - The Man in Black. .................... 53 Chapter Five - Daddy Coming Up From Out of the Well......... 69 Chapter Six - Fixed Stars Govern a Life ........................74 Conclusion............................................... 80 Works Cited.............................................. 83 Works Consulted......................................... 87 iii ABSTRACT Proceeding from a close reading of both Birthdqy Letters and the poems of Sylvia Plath, and also from a consideration of secondary and biographical works, I argue that implicit within Birthdqy Letters is an explanation for Sylvia Plath's death and Ted Hughes's role in it. Birthdqy Letters is a collection of 88 poems written by Ted Hughes to his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in the years following her death. There are two aspects to the explanation Ted Hughes provides. Both are connected to Sylvia Plath's poetry. Her development as a poet not only causes her death as told in Birthdqy Letters, but it also renders Ted Hughes incapable of helping her, because through her poetry he is made to adopt the role of Plath's father.
    [Show full text]
  • Confronted Patriarchy in Sylvia Plath's Poems
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by TEFLIN (Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia) Journal (State University... CONFRONTED PATRIARCHY IN SYLVIA PLATH'S POEMS Kukuh Prayitno Subagyo Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia Abstract: The American literary canons, mainly those of the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, had consistently portrayed women as subservient citizens. Women in the American culture had been put under men s domina- tion and thus lost their identity and been unable to determine their own fate. They played roles long prescribed by men, both in the home and in their so- cial milieu. As products of the era, a number of Sylvia Plath s poems depict confrontation against this phenomenon of patriarchy in which women have been inferior to and abused by men; they fight for freedom and to regain their true roles as women and human beings. Key words: the American literary canons, patriarchy, Sylvia Plath s poems The American nineteen fifties and sixties have witnessed the advent of literary works portraying women s struggle for liberation, the so-called Women s Movement, whose members turned out to be assertive activists struggling for the sake of their fellow woman citizens. The Women s Movement for libera- tion gained its momentum during these decades, and continued to color the lit- erary works of all genres even in the ensuing years. In fact, such woman- related themes as feminism, women studies, and women s emancipation have dominated not only the American literary genres but those of the world as well beyond the turn of the second millennium.
    [Show full text]
  • Sylvia and the Absence of Life Before Ted
    http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2018v23n1p133 SYLVIA AND THE ABSENCE OF LIFE BEFORE TED. Mariana Chaves Petersen* Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Sul Abstract: As Bronwyn Polaschek mentions in The Postfeminist Biopic, the film Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003) is based on biographies of Sylvia Plath that focus on her relationship with husband Ted Hughes – such as Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. In this paper, grounded in the works of Linda Hutcheon, Mary E. Hawkesworth, and Tracy Brain, I argue that this biography works as a palimpsest of Sylvia and that the film constructs Plath as the Ariel persona, neglecting her “Juvenilia” – her early poetry, as it has been defined by Hughes. Sylvia actually leaves Plath’s early life – before she met Hughes – aside and it thus ends up portraying her more as a wife than as a writer. Finally, by bringing information on Plath’s life before she met Hughes from a more recent biography (by Andrew Wilson), I analyze how a different image of Plath might have been created if this part of her life were not missing in the film. Keywords: Sylvia. Sylvia Plath. Adaptation studies. Biopic. Feminist criticism. She wanted to be everything, I think. She was always searching for the self that she was going to be. — Elinor Friedman Klein, qtd. in Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl Love’s Song How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl? — Sylvia Plath, from her journals Introduction: a chosen branch Several were the attempts to fictionalize Sylvia Plath by making her a character in novels, poems, films, and biographies.
    [Show full text]
  • Sylvia Plath's “Daddy” As Autobiography
    IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities Volume 7 – Issue 1 – Summer 2020 Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” as Autobiography Najoua Stambouli University of Sfax, Tunisia Abstract Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection of poems placed her among the United States’ most important confessional poets of the twentieth century. Almost all the poems in Ariel, which were written during the last few months of Plath’s life and published after her death, are “personal, confessional, felt” (Lowell, 1996, p. xiii). Several events that are mentioned in these poems make reference to the poet’s own life experience. Plath, indeed, “transformed her own life into writing” (Bassnett, 2005, p. 5). Analyses such as these have led some critics to consider much of Plath’s poetry to be an eloquent expression of her own factual experience. “Daddy”, one of the best-known poems in the Ariel volume, incorporates several autobiographical details worthy of note. The first part of this research paper is an investigation into the diverse autobiographical elements present in “Daddy”; the second part is an analysis of Plath’s faithfulness in transforming details about her private life into art. Keywords: confessional poetry, autobiography, personal reality, Confessional School 69 IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities Volume 7 – Issue 1 – Summer 2020 Introduction Sylvia Plath is considered one of the prominent figures of the confessional school of poetry. Both her prose and poetry are marked by the confessional mode. Because the purpose of this paper is to explore the way Plath handles and unmasks very personal life details directly in her poem “Daddy”, it will be crucial to shed some light on the confessional style adopted in her poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • Sylvia Plath's Daddy
    44 Sylvia Plath’s Daddy: The Intersection of the Personal and the Historical Anita Luther Bhasin Awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982 for her Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, written in 1962, which appears in this collection, is perhaps her best known poem. It has elicited a variety of critical reactions, from feminist praise for its unadulterated rage towards male dominance, to wariness in its usage of Holocaust imagery. It has been reviewed and criticized by scores of scholars, and is upheld as one of the best examples of confessional poetry. Written a few months before her suicide, “Daddy” gives a voyeuristic view of Plath’s life as she skillfully combines the personal and the private with the historical to mount a brutal and venomous attack on her father Otto Plath and, indirectly on her husband, Ted Hughes. As Sylvia Plath is acknowledged to be a major confessional poet it follows that “Daddy” has autobiographical elements in it. It is therefore essential to know something about her father and the over-powering influence he had on her. Otto Plath immigrated to America from Grabow, a town in the Polish Corridor. He was a Professor of Biology in the University of Boston and died of diabetes when Sylvia Plath was nine. Sylvia, who hero-worshipped her father, never wholly recovered from this emotional loss. For this supposed act of desertion and betrayal she attacked him in several poems. While in her earlier poems her rage was turned inwards resulting in bitter self- reproach, in her later ones she directly attacked her father since her love for him was mingled with sadomasochistic feelings: ..
    [Show full text]
  • A Passage to "Ariel": Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self Author(S): GREG JOHNSON Source: Southwest Review, Vol
    Southern Methodist University A Passage to "Ariel": Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self Author(s): GREG JOHNSON Source: Southwest Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (WINTER 1980), pp. 1-11 Published by: Southern Methodist University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43469198 Accessed: 21-05-2016 12:24 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Southern Methodist University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Southwest Review This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A Passage to ' 'Ariel " Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self GREG JOHNSON Sylvia plath's poetry has been misinterpreted as "confessional" per- haps in an attempt to grant her - both as woman and as poet - a measure of the compassion she seemingly would not grant herself. This kind of compassionate acceptance has been offered, quite understandably, by poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and A. Alvarez, yet their individual assessments of Plath's work are disappointing because of their insistence upon the intimate connection between Plath's life and her poetry; this connection has been emphasized to such an extent that other, more meaningful connections have been ignored - or worse, made to seem irrelevant - and the result has been to exaggerate the significance of Plath's life while minimizing the importance of her art.
    [Show full text]
  • Symbolic Order in Sylvia Plath's “Daddy” and “Lady
    V (2018) 2, 429–444 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Ovaj rad dostupan je za upotrebu pod licencom Creative Commons Imenovanje 4.0 međunarodna. Somaye MOSTAFAEI UDK 821.111(73).09 Plath, S.-1 University of Semnan 159.964.2:82 Semnan Province, Semnan, Daneshgah Street Iran DOI: https://doi.org/10.29162/ANAFORA.v5i2.9 [email protected] Prethodno priopćenje Ensieh SHABANIRAD Preliminary Communication University of Tehran Tehran Province, Tehran, Kargare-Shomali Street Primljeno 6. svibnja 2018. Iran Received: 6 May 2018 [email protected] Prihvaćeno 29. studenog 2018. Accepted: 29 November 2018 SYMBOLIC ORDER IN SYLVIA PLATH’S “DADDY” AND “LADY LAZARUS”: A LACANIAN READING Abstract Sylvia Plath’s works are mainly considered self-reflective mirrors that reverberate her predicaments, especially her troubled relationships with her father and her hus- band. Plath’s responses to gender-biased language, which is the main medium of male-dominated discourses, are full of conflicting desires. On the one hand, as one of the subjects of language, Plath wants to preserve her submissive position; on the other hand, as a poet, she desires to create her own order free of the restrictive and meddling presence of male-centered language. This paper thus aims to investigate the role of the Father in Sylvia Plath’s two significant works, “Daddy” (1965) and “Lady Lazarus” (1965), by the employment of Jacques Lacan’s views on the order of identity formation and creation of the subject, especially Lacan’s Symbolic Order. This paper is an attempt to investigate how the presence and absence of the father figure influences Plath and how she rebuilds a new Order with the free play of signi- fication and devoid of the domineering voice of the Father.
    [Show full text]
  • SYLVIA Studyguide2
    The Story of the Film The film Sylvia tells the story of the poet, Sylvia Plath, from her first meeting with Ted Hughes in 1956 to her death at the age of 30. The film concentrates upon the relationship between the two poets: their marriage, the time spent together teaching in America, their return to England and the birth of their two children, Frieda and Nicholas. It portrays the passion and romance of the early relationship and its progress into jealousy, suspicion, infidelity and separation, culminating in Sylvia’s suicide in 1963. FIRST IMPRESSIONS THE BIOPIC AND BIOGRAPHY Filmmakers and audiences seem to be attracted to biographies. The lives of ‘real’ people fascinate us no matter what form they are presented in – biography, autobiography, newspaper articles, television programmes, magazine articles/features and films. Yet why should this be? Why do we desire information about certain people? In trying to write about or visually present the life of someone on film or television there are a variety of sources that we could turn to – previous biographies, letters, journals etc. When we are looking at the film Sylvia we are looking at a story about a relationship – between two poets, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. One could say that the film is therefore a new biography, drawing on a variety of sources as in the chart below. Plath’s Poetry Plath’s Journals ‘Letters Home’ Sylvia Interviews and Sylvia Plath (film) memoirs Previous written Ted Hughes’ Poetry, biographies of in particular Sylvia Plath ‘Birthday Letters’ This new film based on the life of Sylvia Plath raises the question of the sources that a biographer can use and also differences of styles within dif- ferent forms of books that we use to find out about the lives of people.
    [Show full text]
  • “Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You”: Sylvia Plath's Father Poems Que
    Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 92 2nd International Conference on Education, Social Science, Management and Sports (ICESSMS 2016) “Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You”: Sylvia Plath’s Father Poems Que Jun School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China [email protected] Abstract. Sylvia Plath experiences her father’s death as a symbolic loss against which she struggles by coveting his love and masculine, creative power in a poetic and primitive merger with him. In a large body of her father-poetry, Plath also makes the father evoke what is for her the equivalent of death. In addition, the dangerous and even deadly father-daughter relationship is often mingled with a “romantic” narrative that entails mutual attraction and sexual tension. Eventually, Daddy and daughter were psychologically and emotionally too intertwined to be separated, even in her death. Keywords: Sylvia Plath, father poem, death, suicide Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), the most idiosyncratic and gifted female poet in the twentieth century, died by suicide at the age of thirty, but the gruesome fact of death, and death as a poetic subject matter, had truly mesmerized her from the time she was eight, when her father passed away in a way inexplicable to a child. Her father Otto Plath was a biology professor specializing in the study of bees, he had diabetes and could have been successfully treated, yet the stubborn man claimed that the disease he had was cancer and refused any medical treatment. By the time he was hospitalized, one leg had become gangrenous, and he died of sepsis.
    [Show full text]
  • Daddy” of Sylvia Plath
    Study Material Department of English Semester: IV Name of the course: EM 09- AMERICAN POETRY Name of the topic: “Daddy” of Sylvia Plath DR. SHAKTIPADA KUMAR Daddy Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath regards her father as her greatest tormentor. Father has always been an obsession with her, denoting Electra awe and admiration. Her treatment of this theme is most consistent in many of her poems, such as Lament, Letter to a Purist, November Graveyard, All the Dead Drears, On the Decline of Oracles, Full Fathom Five, Electra on Azalea Plath, The Bee- Keeper’s Daughter, Man in Black, The Colossus, Little Fugue and Daddy. Published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel, the poem was originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath's separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and four months before her death by suicide. It is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet’s relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath. Told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem depicts the speaker's struggle to break free of his influence. Daddy belongs to the last phase of Plath’s creative life. In Little Fugue (1962) the speaker recounts the memory of her father: Such a dark funnel, my father! I see your voice Black and leafy, as in my childhood, A yew hedge of orders, Gothic and barbarous, pure German This image of the father as black, Germanic autocrat is the beginning point of Daddy (1962)— the last poem of the father, “an emotional, psychological and historical autopsy, a final report” (Mary Lynn Broo, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath).
    [Show full text]
  • Ariel by Sylvia Plath Note to Teachers
    An Instructor's Guide to Ariel by Sylvia Plath Note to Teachers Themes: mortality, transcendence, feminine spirit, power Love set you going like a fat gold watch. From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars Govern a life. Between the first and last lines of this remarkable collection, between the infant’s “clear vowels” of “Morning Song” and the “white skull” of “Words,” Sylvia Plath created an unprecedented poetic vision.Published in 1964, the poems of Ariel were written in the final months of Plath’s life, and their harsh brilliance made an immediate and lasting impact on readers. Perhaps the most famous, still, of the Ariel poems are “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” and those that present a sensitive young woman battling the forces of society and her own demons to achieve an imaginative transformation determined solely by herself. Grappling with both the minutiae of daily life and historical and mythic grandeur, these poems attempt to raise existence—and the poet herself—to a new level of transcendence and intensity. Alternately brutal and gentle, slashing and caressing, Plath’s verses have been seen as both out of proportion and unbalanced, on the one hand, and unprecedentedly focused and courageous on the other. Whether speaking as Mary, Medusa, or herself, Sylvia Plath fashioned poems that remain “proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined ”(George Steiner). Slyvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and the classic novel The Bell Jar.
    [Show full text]