Daddy Dearest
Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," written on October 12, 1962 and posthumously published in 1965's Ariel, is one of the author's most well-known poems, though it may be considered one of her most controversial. Plath's vivid description and use of the Holocaust imagery to draw parallels to her relationship with her father, Otto Plath, a German immigrant who passed away shortly after Plath's eighth birthday, and her husband Ted Hughes. In "Daddy," Plath expresses her frustration at her father and how he has inadvertently defined her future relationships with men.
It has been speculated that "Daddy" deals with Plath's deep attachment to her father's memory and how it had affected her life. Plath, herself, described that the poem was about "a girl with an Elektra complex." "Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time -- " may be an indication that Plath is trying to move past her attachment to her father as the main male figure in her life. Plath voices her frustrations at her father's premature death and continues to express her deep love for her father through her suicide attempt with the hoping to join him in death. Plath writes, "I was ten when they buried you./At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you."
In "Daddy," Plath sympathizes with the Jews as she feels betrayed by Germans, in this case her father. Plath exploits the "oppressor-oppressed" dynamic by describing how her...
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath's Daddy Any attempt to interpret a work of literature by a writer as prolific, as pathological, as tormented and as talented as Sylvia Plath requires a good deal of caution. A lot of Path's work is biographical -- one might successfully argue that the vast majority of the work of virtually any author is biographical to a certain extent. For Plath, however, this association between art and life, poetry
There were also a few children's books by Sylvia Plath that there publish which include: "The Bed Book" (1976), "The It-Doesn't-Matter'Suit" (1996), "Collected Children's Stories" (2001), and "Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen" (2001). In conclusion, Sylvia Plath is a great American poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist that provided the world with many great poems, short stories, prose and essays. For most of her short life, she suffered from clinical depression,
Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within
Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips," the speaker is a sick woman in bed in hospital. She weaves in and out of a drug-induced sleep, and much of the poem reads like a hallucinogenic stupor. The reader perceives the hospital room through the speaker's eyes, which focus especially on the colors white and red. White represents the peace and calm of snow, winter, nurse's caps, and purity. The red of the
The reader must search for the theme of the poem, and only from learning about Plath's own life can ascertain that the subject. Plath's esoteric references are less accessible than Lincoln's musings about suicide, death, and hell. However, both Plath and Lincoln do directly mention death in their poems. Lincoln's narrator mentions in line two of "Suicide's Soliloquy" his "carcass" and then in line three, the "buzzards" that "pick
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now