Sylvia Plath's 1957 Poems

Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, 2014

European Scientific Journal, 2014

Sylvia Plath's poems mirror the ideological aspirations of its social context, and the construction of identity in her works falls under the impact of their specific contemporary historical context. The bulk of her aesthetic production reflects the ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement and its aim to elevate the cultural autonomy of American women. One of the major characteristics of this era roughly the 1960's and 1970's, is women's endeavor to break out from the dominant patriarchal appropriation. This study purports to investigate some selected poems by Sylvia Plath and how these poems represented Plath as a relentless feminist writer and activist until her death. The study follows the development of the poet's identity from a helpless object into a fighter who tried to win all her wars against the male sex. A large number of Plath's poems deals with the feeling of women, treated as an object, a commodity, not allowed to be an independent person.

2006

The aim of this article is to give an insight into the use of the echo or repetition in the poetry of the American poet Sylvia Plath. The echo or repetition covers most of the poems of the poetic volume Ariel, but many questions arise on the use of this technique by Plath. There are different opposing viewpoints that discuss the fact if this technique was used deliberately or not. The reason of using it is most appropriately given by the psychological approach. According to Freud's case-stories, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", repetitions are done unconsciously and are related to isolation. In most of her poems Plath shows the speaker entrapped in the cage of her mind and in the state of a child, this is also shown by the fact that she continuously repeats words or phrases. Plath, herself, was very addicted to Freud and Jung and very often found herself in their case-stories. Repetitions are mostly used during the last years of Plath's life during which she became one with the speaker of her poems and this was a way of expressing and controlling her anger in the "shriek" poems. This technique is part of the rebirth and transcendence poems, which are symbols of repetition.

2017

The life and work of Sylvia Plath has been of great interest since her suicide in 1963. While her poems and short stories had been published in a variety of journals and magazines before her death, it was not until the posthumous release of Ariel that Plath's true depths were discovered by a large audience and she gained popular acclaim. Critics now claim that The Colossus and Other Poems was Plath's discovery of her own voice and her taking on of "the world of what is important to her" (Kendall 9), but that it is Ariel that unrepentantly reveals Plath's true emotions (Butscher 341). The "Sylvia 1 " identity that arose from the ashes of Plath's suicide was someone new to critics and friends alike-as Bere says, there are "obvious discrepancies between the [public] Sivvy of the letters 'singing' her 'native joy of life' and the violent, destructive poet of Ariel" (Wagner-Martin 61); however, there is something undeniably real about the "Sylvia" that appears in Ariel. The Ariel Sylvia was not the put-together Sylvia that would have tea in one's living room nor the doting daughter who would write letters home from England nor Hughes's Sylvia who "had a great capacity for happiness" (Becker 48). Instead, Ariel's "Cut," "Edge," and "Daddy" focus on death, hatred, and pain-not topics someone "remorselessly bright and energetic" (Butscher 341) would fixate on. While some artists have placed their identity farther from their work, Plath is known for her confessional style poetrya form of poetry which, according to Steven Gould Axelrod, consists of three essential elements: "an undisguised exposure of painful personal event. .. a dialectic of private matter with public matter. .. and an intimate, unornamented style" (Axelrod 98). Unlike other styles of poetry that are set apart by form or specific themes, confessional poetry is defined by the author's "expression of personal pain" such as "destructive family relationships; traumatic childhoods; broken marriages; recurring mental breakdowns; alcoholism 1 "Sylvia" refers specifically to Plath's identity, whether that be a false or true identity. It does not speak to Plath's work or legacy, but rather, who she was as a person. Daly 3 or drug abuse" (Collins 197). Born out of feelings of lost individuality that arose in the 1950s and 60s, confessional poetry aimed to "embody the individual perception in direct ways," setting itself apart from previous forms because "rather than creating masks or different personae, they [confessional poets] began to speak from a position which was unambiguously their own" (Collins 199). For these reasons, writing confessional poetry requires an understanding of one's own suffering, along with an ability and willingness to capture that personal pain in an honest and vulnerable form of poetry-after all, it has been coined "confessional poetry" because it requires that the author "confess" painful truths regarding him or herself. A single glance at poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" shows that Plath was a textbook example of the confessional poether writing (especially at the end of her life) focused on her own painful struggles with loss, a dying marriage, mental illness, and other challenging areas of her life. One such autobiographical poems is "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," a poem that discusses Plath's actual experience of answering the phone and having her husband's lover ask to speak to him. The poem describes the speaker receiving a call from an unnamed individual who asks, "Is he here?" It is a seemingly harmless question, but the poems describes the words as "plopping like mud," implyingin a heavy-handed fashionthat there is something about these words in this context that is dirty and sullies the speaker's home. The speaker then asks, "how shall I ever clean the phone table?" (Plath, Collected Poems, 202), bringing to light the speaker's desire to clean her household of the incident, which she considers to be filthy and unhealthy. It also demonstrates a hopelessness that this stain could ever be removed from them, as the speaker finds no answer for how to clean the phone table. As is typical of confessional poems, there is very little masking of the real-life event in this poem, and the speaker is not invented, but rather is interchangeable with Plath herself. Just like the speaker Daly 4 in the poem, Plath historically answered the phone in 1962 only to have Assia, Hughes' lover, ask her "Is he here?" about Plath's husband. As demonstrated by "Words heard, by accident, over the phone" above, Plath adopted a very personal style of poetry, tying her poems to her identity in a way that many authors would not dare, and bringing her identity into the spotlight with the success of Ariel. Like "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," countless other poems by Sylvia Plath including "Suicide off Egg Rock," "Edge," and "Cut" are inspired by her experiences. For this reason, it can become easy to view her poems as biography or fact, when they are actually creative works. While it is true that Plath's poems are often emotionally relevant to her, the emotions that she conveys were never meant to be expressed as singularly her own. Rather, she intended to write poetry that would echo both her own emotions and the emotions of her audience. The sheer number of drafts

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been a widely discussed subject ever since her death and the posthumous release of her final collection of poems, Ariel. As Linda Wagner-Martin notes: Ted Hughes' releasing of his version of the collection, started the “cult of Plath.” (Wagner-Martin, 1999: X) This is a most fitting statement, as her poetry is often read through a biographical approach, trying to find the person Sylvia Plath in her work. It is a culturally constructed search for a unique author, trying to force an imaginary person upon the text. One of the most susceptible poems is “Lady Lazarus”, part of Ariel and the famous “October Poems.” However, a fully biographical reading of the poetry will not do justice to the multiple layers of meaning to be found in these texts. The following paper will make an attempt in reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” under the aspect of “the author.” The assumption is that while the poem invites a biographical reading due to its theme of suicide and depression, it ultimately tries to accomplish the very opposite task, actively defying the construction of a genuine author. By utilizing Roland Barthes' ideas in his influential essay “Death of the Author” as the theoretical basis, the narrative structure of the poem will be analyzed to understand how exactly the author as a real existence is negated and instead deconstructed. Emphasis will be put on the Holocaust imagery Plath makes repeated use of. Furthermore, an analysis of the spaces represented in “Lady Lazarus” through Michel Foucault’s “On Other Spaces” will extend the motif of the imaginary author onto a spatial level. The last chapter will negotiate in how far Sylvia Plath’s poem can be read as “Camp” when being analyzed under the theoretical idea of the “death of the author.” Beforehand, the initial chapter will make a short attempt in reading the poem biographically, trying to find Sylvia Plath in the figure of Lady Lazarus. It will give insight into why such a reading might be easy to accomplish, eventually though fails to capture the various levels of meaning and inconsistency. As Susan Gubar notes: “Plath's poetry broods upon […] the contamination of the very idea of the genuine.” (Gubar, 2007: 181)

International Journal of Aquatic Science ISSN:2008-8019, 2021

Very few things in literary history have created an impact that has been associated with the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The sad circumstances that have preceded and followed her death have made it even more sinister and intriguing and their shadows have cast a huge veil of uncertainty and darkness which have within no time created a literary and cultural polarization. It also side-lined the modern poetry movement which was just picking up its lost reins after the second world war. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes should have played a major role in such a revival. On the other hand, a whole generation of literary critics, writers, biographers, and social enthusiasts have focussed more than due attention to biographical details that do not contribute much to literary biography. They were engaged in a battle to establish or bring to light the gross injustice that has been perpetrated against an innocent girl trapped in a wedlock.

Review of English Studies, 2012

Death is one of the significant and recurrent themes in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. This paper aims at showing the poet's attitudes towards death. Certain poems are selected to show the poet's different attitudes to death: death as a rebirth or renewal, and death as an end. Most obvious factors shaped her attitudes towards death were the early death of her father that left her unsecured, and the unfaithfulness of her husband, Ted