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 her strong suspicion of his adultery with the English poet Assia evill ("Sylvia Plath"; "Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963" 2). Sylvia Plath had also made several previous suicide attempts, beginning at age 20, or perhaps even earlier, always precipitated by the spells of depression and debilitating self-doubt that dogged the poet from early adolescence on (Neurotic Poets, Sylvia Plath 6-7). As Plath wrote, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published in January 1963, less than a month before her suicide, in…...
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Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
- -- . "Daddy." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J.
Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 4th Compact Ed. New York, Longman,, 2005. 830.
- -- . "Lady Lazarus." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J.
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 and reality, is of particular interest to a number of readers due to her deep rooted depression, the climactic end of her life, and the angst and success she frequently experienced while living. Perhaps the poem that single-handedly addresses all of these fascinating components of Plath's life and work is "Daddy." One of the most notable things about this particular piece is that the author expresses extreme hatred towards a male -- perhaps more than one male -- in this…...
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Works Cited
Materer, Timothy. "Sylvia Plath." American Novelists Since World War II: Fourth Series. Ed. James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 152. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Mclanahan, Thomas. "Sylvia Plath." American Poets Since World War II. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Literature Resource Center. Web.
"Overview: 'Daddy'." Poetry for Students. Vol. 28. Detroit: Gale. 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web.
There were also a few children's books by Sylvia Plath that there publish which include: "The ed ook" (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, which is very evident in many of her written pieces. She used writing as a way to release her depressed feelings, but it was not enough to prevent her from committing suicide in 1963 at the young age of 30. It has been through the efforts of her mother, her husband and her children that many of her written pieces have been able to be shared with the world. She was a great writer, but depression not only ended the…...
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Bibliography
1. Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. London, Mebourne, Auckland, and Heinemann, 1991.
2. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. London:Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
3. The Sylvia Plath Homepage. July 13, 2006 www.sylviaplath.de
4. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Frame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Mariner Books, 1995.
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 tulips symbolize tension, anxiety, interference, and possibly also death. Although the speaker does not die at the end of the poem, the theme of "Tulips" is the fine line between life and death and the centrality of health to personal identity.
The speaker straddles the fine line between life and death throughout the poem. She uses the word "slip" to show that she slips in and out of consciousness. The reader never learns exactly why the speaker is in the hospital,…...
The eade must seach fo the theme of the poem, and only fom leaning about Plath's own life can ascetain that the subject. Plath's esoteic efeences ae less accessible than Lincoln's musings about suicide, death, and hell. Howeve, both Plath and Lincoln do diectly mention death in thei poems. Lincoln's naato mentions in line two of "Suicide's Soliloquy" his "cacass" and then in line thee, the "buzzads" that "pick my bones." Likewise, in the second and thid lines of "Edge," Plath descibes "He dead / Body."
Both poets focus on physical motality with gaphic desciptions of dakness and despai. Both also weave imagey of life and death to ceate complexity and lue the eade. Plath's subject matte is a dead woman who "weas the smile of accomplishment" afte he death (line 3). Yet he life is "ove" and efeences to blood and bones povide mobid motifs. Lincoln's fist-peson naato is…...
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references to hell are anachronistic in the 21st century, whereas Plath's juxtaposition of life and death seems more modern. Both poems offer challenging and deeply personal insights into tricky topics like death, psychological suffering, and suicide.
The poem "Daddy" thus chronicles a personal misery that is shared by all of Europe, bleeding its collective wounds of guilt at the end of orld ar II. This sense of the personal and the impersonal becoming melded into poetry is what gives "Daddy" its power. Everyone, not just everyone with a personal, historical family connection to the Holocaust can understand the speaker. She is everywoman, and perhaps everyone who has had a self-defeating, masochistic relationship with someone in the present, because she or he is still emotionally living in the past, replaying an old childhood drama.
Plath's complicated relationship with parenting, and her inability to fully trust or inhabit a healthy relationship is also seen in "Morning Song," which depicts a mother rising to comfort a crying baby. Unlike the relationship of "Daddy," the mother and child seem to have a normal bond -- the mother wakes to comfort the…...
Daddy by Sylvia Plath: An Explication
At first glance, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" seems like the ranting of an adolescent breaking away from an oppressive parent.
In fact, on one level, this poem is a poetic tirade directed at a father who is the source of considerable pain, but Plath has loftier goals than adolescent angst for this poem. The narrator in "Daddy" is actually a 30-year-old woman and presumably the voice of Sylvia Plath. This poem, like much of Plath's poetry, is autobiographical. In fact, Ariel,1 the collection that includes "Daddy," is an autobiographical collection of poetry that describes Plath's life leading up to her suicide. In "Daddy" she attempts to connect the intensely personal suffering of a woman (Plath) who never recovered from the death of her father to a more universal suffering, whether it's between father and daughter, husband and wife or tyrant and captive.
The poem opens with the narrator…...
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Works Cited
Bundtzen, Lynda K. Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983
Bundtzen, Lynda K. The Other Ariel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001
Muller, Gilbert H. Introduction to Literature. McGraw-Hill, 1994
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1961
The childhood terror and intimidation caused by the paternal image is illustrated by her association with Nazi persecution of Jews. The rejection of her brutal and life-denying father is opposed to her love and admiration for him: "Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you/.At twenty I tried to die / and get back, back, back to you."
The tone of the poem is another important element in the overall lyrical body; it is based on constructing a voice that changes throughout the poem from unpleasant and rebellious to proud to murderous. These shifts in tone generate shift in the general mood of the poem in the sense that she manages to recover long lost feelings of resentment and pain from her childhood and to express them in the context of her state of mind when writing the poem, i.e. during adulthood. It…...
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M.D. Uroff, "Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration." Iowa Review 1977: Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 104-15. Literature Research Center. Gale Group. http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/uroff.html
Wagner-Martin, Linda; Stevenson, Anne. "Two Views on Silvia Plath's Life and Career." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, 1994. Rpt. In Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/twoviews.htm
ut she knows he is dead, apparently, is the impression I get when she spends her hours "married to shadow" and no longer listens "for the scrape of a keep on the blank stones of the landing." Does "married to shadow" to mean her actual marriage isn't working well? Or that she is in a dark place due to her dad's passing, and she must observe the living world from the point-of-view of a kind of living death?
Was there an overall theme to the book of poems? In a way she seems to be conveying a rebellion against the world, against her life, and there are death and dying images throughout the book. She rebels against her piano lessons ("The Disquieting Muses") though she was "tone-deaf" and "unteachable"; she rebels against love ("Love is the bone and sinew of my curse" she writes in "The Stones").
What kind of voice…...
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Bibliography
Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus & Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. New York: Vintage Books,
Mirror" by Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, in her poem, "Mirror," uses a number of devices to bring across to the reader her theme. The title for example serves to give the reader an initial idea of the theme, and indeed this appears to be substantiated by the rest of the text. Nonetheless, there is also a deeper, more emotional theme that emerges towards the later lines of the poem. Thus, Plath uses devices such as symbolism, imagery and contrast in order to explicate the theme of reality and emotion as they are intertwined with the mirror on the wall of an aging woman.
The first lines of the poem then begin to explicate the role of the mirror from a purely factual, realistic point-of-view. This is substantiated by the material symbolism of the mirror: it is made of glass, which is "silver and exact" (line 1), showing everything "Just as it…...
Plath speaks of this state as winter, "scrupulously austere in its order" in which the girl is completely in control of her own feelings and not tempted to experience sexual pleasure, her "heart's frosty discipline exactly as a snowflake." A snowflake is an apt metaphor for a spinster, a woman separate and unattached, not moved or controlled by another person (and particularly not by a man), a snowflake drifting.
In the fourth stanza the girl definitely feels tempted by "a burgeoning" of sexual desire that affects her physical senses ("her five queenly wits"). "Vulgar motley" represents allowing sexual feelings to take over uncontrolled. The girl sees this state as "A treason not to be borne" or her body working against her rationality. Society (and her mother, perhaps) has told her only fools allow men to have their way, that women who have sex before marriage become society's pariahs. So the…...
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…...
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WORKS CITED
MacGowan, Christopher. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Malden, MA: Blackwell
That sums up her mother's life to her, and she does not want the same life for herself.
Another interesting aspect of the novel is Esther's relationship with men, many of whom represent her missing father in one way or another. Her relationship with Constantin and most of the other men in the novel is platonic, and she trusts these men with certain aspects of her personality. She "sleeps" with Constantin, but does not have sex with him, like a father figure. Dr. Gordon is also a man she can look up to like a father, but like most of the men in the novel, he is totally disinterested in Esther herself. All of these men represent her missing father, because her relationship with them is not romantic, and she confides in some of them as she would a father. Even Buddy's father acts as a father figure, and says…...
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References
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
Eventually, Esther sneaks into the cellar with a bottle of sleeping pills -- prescribed to her for the insomnia she was experiencing, without any other real attempts to understand or solve the underlying problems of her mental upset -- having left a note for her mother saying she was taking a long walk. Esther then swallows as many of the pills as she is able, and it appears to be several days (it is never conclusively stated in the text) before she is found and taken to the hospital, where she awakens to learn that she has yet again been unsuccessful.
Following her physical convalescence, Esther is subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, which she notes has a soothing effect on her depression. Things begin to look somewhat better for Esther; she is being well-cared for at a private hospital paid for by a rich benefactress and admirer of Esther's work. The…...
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Works Cited
Buell, Frederick. "Sylvia Plath's Traditionalism." Boundary 2-5(1) (1976), pp. 195-212.
Plat as well as an examination of two of er poems. Tere were tree sources used to complete tis paper.
Her Life
Sylvia Plat spent er sort adult life as a writer. Her works are eld up today as classic pieces of poetry and literature and examined for teir undercurrents as well as teir meanings. Plat was born in 1932 to a professor fater of German descent and an American moter wose parents were of Austria. Her fater ad migrated to te states wen e was 15 years old and e met er moter at a German class tat se took in later years. He was te teacer, se was te student and teir union ended in marriage and te birt of Sylvia (Sylvia Plat (ttp://victorian.fortunecity.com/plat/500/bio2.tm).
Plat was an overaciever er entire life. Se skipped grades in scool and won onors bot academically and socially in er ig scool ventures. Se often…...
1. The symbolism of the caged bird in Maya Angelou's autobiographical work, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." 2. The theme of captivity and freedom in Harper Lee's novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." 3. Analyzing the oppression and confinement of women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." 4. The symbolism of the birdcage in Henrik Ibsen's play, "A Doll's House," in relation to gender roles and societal expectations. 5. Comparing the experiences of the caged birds in Richard Wright's novel, "Native Son," and Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, "The Handmaid's Tale." 6. Exploring the theme of captivity and liberation in Jean Rhys's....
In the realm of good writing, a title is more than just a label; it is a captivating first impression that can entice readers to delve into the depths of your work. A truly memorable title has the power to resonate with an audience, spark curiosity, and set the tone for the journey that lies ahead. Crafting such a title requires a delicate balance of intrigue, brevity, and relevance to the content. Here are the key elements that contribute to the allure of a captivating title:
I. Introduction A. Background information on The Bell Jar and its author, Sylvia Plath B. Brief summary of the novel and its protagonist, Esther Greenwood C. Thesis statement: The societal pressure depicted in The Bell Jar negatively impacts Esther Greenwood's mental health. II. Society's Expectations for Women in the 1960s A. Description of societal norms and expectations for women during the 1960s B. Analysis of how these expectations influence Esther's perception of herself and her place in society III. Pressure to Succeed Academically and Professionally A. Discussion of the pressure placed on Esther to excel in her academic and professional pursuits B.....
Societal Pressure's Impact on Esther Greenwood's Mental Health in The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, delves into the mental health struggles of protagonist Esther Greenwood as she navigates a society that places immense pressure on young women. Societal expectations, gender roles, and conformity shape Esther's journey, exacerbating her anxiety and depression. 1. Societal Expectations for Women In the post-World War II era depicted in the novel, women were expected to conform to a traditional ideal of domesticity and motherhood. Esther feels immense pressure to achieve societal success and marry a suitable man. This weight on her shoulders creates an....
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