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Essay on sylvia plath
Biography of sylvia plath
Characters of the initiation of sylvia plath
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Sylvia Plath was a gifted writer, poet and verbal artist whose personal anguish and torment visibly manifested itself in her work. Much of her angst stems from her warped relationship with her father. Other factors that influenced her works were her strained views of human sexuality, her sado-masochistic tendencies, self-hatred and her traditional upbringing. She was labeled as a confessional poet and biographical and historical material is absolutely necessary to understand her work.
Syliva Plath was born on 27, 1963, in Boston, Massachusetts to Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober. Otto Plath was a professor of biology and German at Boston University. He was of German descent and had emigrated from Grabow when he was fifteen. Her mother was a first generation American; she was born in Boston to Austrian parents. Their common Germanic background indirectly led to their meeting in 1929. Aurelia Schober took a German class taught by Otto Plath. Aurelia was working on a master’s degree in English and German at Bosto n University. Otto Plath was guided by his principles of discipline. Their background was one major source of for Sylvia’s poetic imagery.
Sylvia’s brother, Warren, was born on April 27, 1935. After Warren’s birth, the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts just east of Boston. Otto’s health began to fail shortly after Warren’s birth. He thought he had cancer as a friend of his, with similar symptoms, had recently lost a battle with lung cancer. “He refused to seek medical care due to the lack of a cure or effective treatment at that time. In 1940 after suffering ill health for years, Otto was forced to see a doctor for an infection in his foot. The doctor diagnosed the illness Otto has been suffering from as not cancer, but diabetes- -and not do advanced that it threatened his life. Otto’s leg had to be removed in October after he developed gangrene, and he spent the rest of his days in the hospital rapidly declining.” (Nuerotic Poets) Otto Plath died on the night of November 5, 1940. Her fathers’s death scarred her permanently; theirs was an extraordinarily close relationship. In 1942, Aurelia moved the family to Wellesley so that she could return to work despite her own health problems to support her family.
Sylvia began writing when she was only five years old. Her first publication was a short couplet she wrote when she was eigh...
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...hould be able to control and manipulate experiences even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind….” (Uroff 37)
Plath’s work is valuable for its ability to reach today’s reader, because of its concern with the real problems of our culture. In this age of gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath’s forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless. She was hailed as literary symbol of the women’s rights movement and a feminist writer of great significance. Sylvia Plath began by creating art that imitated life, but ended when life imitated art.
Works Cited
Butscher, Edward, ed. with and introduction. Sylvia Plath: the woman and the work. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977.
Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
Sylvia Plath. Ed. Brenda C Mondragon. n.d. Web. 18 May 2015. http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/
Uroff, Margaret Dickie. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
In American society, the common stereotype is that the father has the role of the dominant figure in the household. Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds may come across as two seemingly different poets, however, they are really quite similar, especially in their driving forces behind their writing styles in poetry. The lives of Plath and Olds are both expressive of the realities of a father-dominated family, in which both of these poets lost their fathers at a young age. This is significant because both poets have faced a similar traumatic event that has had everlasting effects on their adult womanhood, which is reflected in their writings. For both these woman, their accesses to father-daughter relationships were denied based on life circumstances. Ironically, their fathers were their muses for writing and are what made them the women they are today.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962. 430 Ed. Karen V. Kukil. Transcribed from the original manuscripts at Smith College. New York: Anchor, 2000.
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Sylvia Plath (American author)." 23 September 2013. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 9 April 2014 .
Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences.
During a time when women didn't have many rights or received much recognition, Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on Oct. 27, 1932 (Rosenberg 10). Her parents would've never expected their daughter would one day become such a success in a male-dominated profession of writing. At an early age, her writing career started to kick off, as well as the start of many dark events that would become the inspiration for her writings. When I first read "Blackberrying" by Plath, I simply thought that it was a simple story about going to pick blackberries only to then get distracted by the lure of the sea. But after reading it a few more times, I started to pick up on the subtleties that lay within the poem.
Plath was born in the seaside town of Winthrop, Massachusetts during the year of 1932. In her first eight years of life, Plath was troubled with the birth of a new sibling, the death of a parent, and the start of a war. These eight years were the calm before the stormy life of Sylvia Plath. As an only child, Plath felt threatened by the new baby in the family. Her new sibling, Warren, sparked a disdain for children that Plath would harbor for the rest of her life. In 1940, Plath’s father died and essentially robbed the children of a proper relationship with their mourning mother. The family moved inland where Plath focused on writing poetry until she began to attend Smith College in 1950.
"About." Personal Blog, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. [When finding an explanation for the similarities between the writers, it is important to play close attention to biographies. In case the psychoeconomic factors that Ruonco describes are true, then biography constitutes most of the development of the Sylvia Plath affliction. Moreover, the biography provides an insight into the views of the author for a better and more accurate understanding of her poetry. Furthermore, it is imperative to use her auto-statement since she referres to her "muse" as something out of her control which can be traced to Kaufman's
Sylvia Plath’s autobiography, The Bell Jar, recalls the events of her own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, as well as her restoration and return into the outside world. In so many ways, Plath’s novel is centered around the struggles of a young woman who cannot reach her goals in a male dominated society. In Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, the author utilizes figurative language and concrete examples to explore the traditional gender roles of being a woman in the 1950s.
Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath--A Marriage. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2003. Print.
Sylvia Plath, born in October 1932, went through a great amount of depression which never receded due to her father’s death in 1940. She unsuccessfully attempted suicide at the ages of 10 and 20. However, in 1954 things seemed hopeful, with Plath obtaining a scholarship to Harvard summer school, then in 1955 with her graduation from Smith College and her attendance to Cambridge University on Fulbright fellowship. On the 16th of June in 1956 Plath was married to Ted Hughes, who was also a poet.
From headlines to cadavers, bell jars to mental illnesses, and a subdued matron to a rebellious young lady, this novel hosts the two overarching themes of alienation and constraints on women in the 1950s. Esther Greenwood separates herself from nearly all of society and simultaneously must overcome the strictures that are set upon her and hinder her from the future she aspires towards. Through extensive imagery, symbolism, and characterization Sylvia Plath delves into how people strive for perfection and acceptance through social standards and additionally how those that do not comply completely with them are alienated from the group of society, either by themselves or by the group.
Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.
Brown, Sally. Plath , Sylvia. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37855, accessed 6 May 2007]
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.
Sylvia Plath has brought the attention of many Women’s studies supporters while being recognized as a great American poet. Most of her attention has come as a result of her tragic suicide at age thirty, but many of her poems reflect actual events throughout her life, transformed into psychoanalytical readings. One of Plath’s most renowned poems is “Daddy”. In this poem there are ideas about a woman’s relationship with men, a possible insight on aspects of Plath’s life, and possible influences from the theories of Sigmund Freud.