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Sylvia plath biography essay
Figurative language in sylvia plath poems
Sylvia plath essays
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Critical Analysis 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. Plath’s difficulties with narrative prose contrasts between her novelistic dreams and her character. Plath’s passion for classic novelists and her own talent made her realize the fitting narrative prose were densely constructed (Hughes 1). Plath’s poetry goes through constant changes (Smith 2). The bee was a motif that was often used (Smith 3).Jerome Mazzaro considers Plath’s achievements in The Bell Jar to be less gendered. Mazzaro also believes Plath’s novel is a statement of fascination of the midcentury (“The Importance…” 2). Marilyn Yalom wrote in Maternity, Morality, and the Literature of Madness that Plath’s novel about her breakdown and her recovery, The Bell Jar, is a pre-feminist disclosure of the effects of the sexist culture. Yalom’s critical view increased from the feminist and psychoanalytic critic of the 1980s (“The Importance…” 1). Plath’s lyricism ranges from simple but effective to a Hopkinsian ode for her beloved (Magill 2223). Her best ability was turning everyday experiences into diary entries (Magill 2225). Plath’s poems from Ariel reflect her fury and sullenness toward life (Draper 2734). Letter’s Home: Correspondence, 1951-1963 (1975) shows Plath’s response to change in her life as an adul... ... middle of paper ... ...he language of war. One of her last poems shows how this vision both restricted and unconstrained her expression (Magill 2225). Some of Plath’s poems, though the personal voice may be dying out, are still very personal (Magill 2226). Plath’s symbolism comes from an arrangement of misfortune. The purpose of Plath’s poems is to show a deeper pattern (Hughes 5). Plath’s narrative, The Bell Jar, remained important to most readers (“The Importance…” 2). Plath believes relationships are necessary, but destructive (Smith 6). Plath is a very personal poet. She also uses symbolism throughout the majority of her poetry and prose. Plath writes based on everyday occurrences during her lifetime. Most of her work is actually diary entries without punctuation. Plath gets most of her inspiration from her everyday life. She enjoyed writing about the things that happened day to day.
Plath never got over the loss of her father and her failed marriage to well known poet Ted Hughes. She wrote, "Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight .... I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father" (cited in Hughes & McCullough, 1982, pp. 266267). In an article, Jon Rosenblatt describes her poetry by saying “Whether the poems take place inside a house or in the countryside, the identical metaphorical relationships are established between a vulnerable speaker and a destructive environment.” By the end of “Daddy” the speaker comes off as a force to be reckoned with and her message is final
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 claimed that in this poem she was adopting the persona of a girl with an Electra complex whose father had been a fascist, but while the poem is not completely autobiographical, it contains several obvious references to her own life. For example, here she refers to the picture of her father:
Sylvia Plath was a troubled writer to say the least, not only did she endure the loss of her father a young age but she later on “attempted suicide at her home and was hospitalized, where she underwent psychiatric treatment” for her depression (Dunn). Writing primarily as a poet, she only ever wrote a single novel, The Bell Jar. This fictional autobiography “[chronicles] the circumstances of her mental collapse and subsequent suicide attempt” but from the viewpoint of the fictional protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who suffers the same loss and challenges as Plath (Allen 890). Due to the novel’s strong resemblance to Plath’s own history it was published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath expresses the themes of alienation and societal pressure on women in the 1950s through symbolism, an unconventional protagonist, and imagery.
"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
Plath writes in seven line stanzas. She uses a unique rhyme scheme that changes from in each stanza. Occasionally she isolates one line in order to annunciate its meaning. She also uses enjambment to help stress the meaning of certain lines. Plath also like to use metaphor and simile in her poem. Lines nine and ten she uses simile when she writes, “Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”. She is stationary in her bed and almost doesn’t want to see everything anymore but she cannot hide what is going on around her.
Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings.
middle of paper ... ... eals the mother’s attitude towards her new role. Just as in the Victorian era where women were limited in their development as individuals and mainly served as wives and mothers, the speaker feels as if she is confined to her new role as a mother and is denied her creative freedom. Clearly, Plath’s poems take a profoundly different approach to the concepts of pregnancy and motherhood, which are usually looked upon as rewarding and fulfilling stages in a woman’s life.
Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.
After reading the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and doing some research on Plath, I came to find out that the poem was very similar to Plath’s personal life. The poem is basically about a young girl who fell in love and gave her all to a boy who never came back to love her. The young girl fell in a depression and made herself believe that she was making it all up. She still had hope that she and the boy could be happy someday, but it never happened and it drove her insane. Perhaps the boy could have been Plath’s husband, Hughes. Everything about the poem is so similar to her marriage with Hughes; the story makes the reader believe the poem could possibly be about Plath herself.
Leenaars, A. A. & Wenckstern, S. (1998). Sylvia Plath: A protocol analysis of her last poems. Death Studies, October 1, 1998, Vol. 22, Issue 7, ISSN: 0748-1187. Retrieved May 6, 2005 from Academic Search Premier Database.
1. Hughes’ poetry paints the indisputable picture of his belief that Plath’s obsession with her father caused her untimely death in February 1963. In an interview in 1996, Hughes described her death to be both ‘complicated and inevitable’, largely blaming his tumultuous and doomed relationship with Plath on her obsession with her father, Otto. Hughes’ poem ‘The God’ paints Plath as unhealthily and obsessively worshipping her dead father or as Hughes refers to him as ‘a non-existent God’, who died when she was 8 years old. Despite this, Hughes believes that he had a major influence on her.
Sylvia Plath poetry is tough. She filled her poems with depressing thoughts. Her style is descirbed as confessional poetry, which assumes writing focusing on themselves, writing about their individual experiences, describing shameful things. Her poetry was very personal.
Through her dark and intense poetry, Sylvia Plath left an eternal mark on the literary community. Her personal struggles with depression, insecurities, and suicidal thoughts influenced her poetry and literary works. As a respected twentieth century writer, Sylvia Plath incorporated various literary techniques to intensify her writing. Her use of personification, metaphors, and allusions in her poems “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Edge”, exemplifies her talent as a poet and the influence her own troubled life had on her poetry.
A brief introduction to psychoanalysis is necessary before we can begin to interpret Plaths poems. Art is the expression of unconscious infantile desires and the strongest of these desires is the wish to “do away with his father and…to take his mother to wife” (Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 411).This is what Freud called the Oedipal conflict. For women the desire is of course reversed to killing the mother and marrying the father and is called the Electra complex. Children resolve this conflict by identifying with their same sex parent. Loss of a parent can prevent the normal resolution of the Oedipal conflict and result in a fixation or obsession with the lost object (object is the term used to define the internal representations of others). The desire to have the lost object back is also the desire for what Freud called primary narcissism. ...