...raised in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts during the Great Depression, Sylvia Plath endured an oppressive and depressing childhood. On the surface, Plath appeared to be intelligent, sensitive, and flawless, but inside she was living in misery. Sylvia Plath's emotional life, and her arduous past with her father's death, her tragic break up with Ted Hughes, feminism, and bipolar disorder played an immense part in her career as a poet by inspiring her to create her somber masterpieces. Despite all her troubles, Sylvia Plath excelled as a student at Smith College, won awards, and prizes for her writing, and was a straight a student. Then, she met her future husband and ex-husband, Ted Hughes, whom she would have two children with. Sylvia Plath, was an extremely prodigious poet, she published her first poem, Circus in Three Rings, at age eight. By writing over 121 compelling poems and one stellar novel based on her life experiences, women's rights and injustices, she became the face of 20th century feminism. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is mainly about 20th century feminism and women’s social injustices. "The poem Daddy criticizes the male aggression and depicts men being responsible for all the social injustices" (Hunt). In Sylvia Plath's versification Daddy, she illustrates how men are dominant over women, by comparing herself to Jews, and men to the Nazis. “I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you” (Plath, "Daddy"). She outlines how women are a minority, and don’t have a...
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...SYLVIA PLATH Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. Her best-known poems are carefully crafted pieces noted for their personal imagery and intense focus. Many concern such themes as alienation, death, and self-destruction. Her vivid imagery, searing tone, and intimate topics cemented her place among the pantheon of great poets. Best known for novel The Bell Jar and her second volume of poetry, Ariel, Plath's reputation has only grown since her death in 1963. She is considered a poet of the confessional movement, which was led by Robert Lowell, but her work transcends this label and speaks to more universal truths than simply her own emotions. Although the sensational nature of her death by suicide has led some critics and readers to conflate the value of her life and art, Sylvia Plath's poetry demonstrates an astonishing capacity to engage with the art of poetry; many of her words and images have become fully entrenched in the literary consciousness. EARLY LIFE Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to Aurelia Schobert Plath (American of Austrian descent) and Otto Emile Plath (immigrant from Grabow, Germany). Her father was a biology and German professor at Boston University. He was also an author of a book based on bumblebees. There was a stark age difference between Plath’s parents, her mother being twenty one years...
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...Mirror – Sylvia Plath This poem is by Sylvia Plath and the narrator is a mirror. The mirror is personified and is endowed with many human traits. This poem is about a mirror that reflects only what it is shown and hence the role of the mirror is said to be the revealer of the reality and truthfulness. The mirror is also said to be faithful. The interesting features’ regarding this poem is how the poet changes tones between the two stanzas, which makes the ending impactful. In the first stanza, the mirror and its role is introduced. The mirror is lonely and its only companion is the wall of which it feels it has become a part of. The mirror shows us some of its human characteristics. However in the second stanza the poet brings in human life, a woman and it is also now a lake, which reflects the unsatisfied lady. The second stanza also shows the comparison of when the lady was young and now when she has become old. The factor of age is brought into the poem, which shows that the lady is getting old and that her reflection in the mirror is displeasing her. The woman turns to other objects such as “The candle” and “The moon” to which the author describes as “liars” which means that they don’t show her for who she really is. The author uses the candle as symbolism for life and the triumph over darkness. However the use of these objects could also represent how humans turn away from the actual truth and go seek something to which they might find more pleasant. The...
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...Literary Commentary Essay: The Rival The quote, “Too much of anything could destroy you, Simon thought. Too much darkness could kill, but too much light could blind” by Cassandra Clare is significant in understanding the concept revolving around this poem. The speaker seems to have trusted her husband too much that when he cheated on her, it came as a sudden shock. Sylvia Plath’s “The Rival” was designed to portray the poem’s aim, to explain that one shouldn’t trust too much since it can end up shattering one’s life. Too much of anything will only harm us. The most prominent way in which this aim was seen through is narration/structure, literal/figurative meaning and one point of allusion. Narration and structure were both effective in recognizing the poem’s aim. Utilizing the poem’s audience as the poet’s husband’s mistress, as well as using a semicolon stresses the poem’s aim. In stanza 3, the poet discusses the rival’ actions. She claims that the rival’s thoughts are sent with love, yet are also considered poisonous. “White and blank expansive as carbon monoxide” The poet demonstrates that the poem’s audience is the poet’s husband’s mistress through of the use of a simile. White is a carries a connotation of cold and lifeless, while, blank is a motif of death and also without life. Thus, the speaker compares the poem’s audience, her husband’s mistress, to carbon monoxide. Not only comparing her, but comparing the effect of carbon monoxide to the effect of her rival. It is...
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...Tulips by Sylvia Plath Tulips, by Sylvia Plath seems to be a poetic expression of depression. The speaker who I assume is Plath is describing the psychological effects after a surgical procedure,which I feel is the time when sadly Plath miscarried her baby. The poem was written through her own view in a hospital room, where the reader is given an insight to the inner thoughts of a woman who has gone through a terrible ordeal, and the objects around her which influence her mentality. The poem follows Plath's admission into hospital and the heart-rendering account of her attempt to recover. There are nine stanzas in the poem, each with five lines, there is no evident rhyme pattern and there is little structure to the poem, although the lack of organization in each stanza seems to be a reflection of the confusion and the loss of control that Plath feels, the only structure shared between the stanzas is the abundance of punctuation, creating a slow rhythm throughout the poem, although Plath uses alliteration to increase fluency in parts of the poem, “plastic-pillowed”, “water went” and “light lies on white walls”. Plaths tone is serene throughout the poem, however there is a sarcastic tone when she says “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here”. The tone of the poem starts out as depressed and bleak then changes into more dynamic and hopeful and the imagery more surreal: “the mouth of some great African cat”. In the first two stanzas, Plath talks about the situation...
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...The poem “Mirror” written by Sylvia Plath identifies the woman’s physical complexities of her beauty that becomes transparent within the mirror. The woman in the poem is getting older, and while she is aging, the mirror goes on watching the process. In the poem, the woman is realizing that she is getting older and that she is losing her natural beauty. The woman is a narcissus because she believes that speaking to the mirror would reveal the truth. The woman has discovered that her physical appearance is changing and she cannot come to face the terms due to the fact that her reflection is aging. The woman’s reflection is observed in the mirror where communication commences between the mirror and the woman. The mirror is candid towards the woman, who is oblivious to the truth about her beauty. Sylvia Plath uses personification to display the human attributes such as truthfulness. “I have no preconceptions. I am not cruel, only truthful” (Plath l 4). The quotation illustrates that the mirror is speaking to the woman and the woman does not have any preconceptions. It displays that the mirror is an inanimate object. The mirror demonstrates truthfulness, not cruelty. The mirror speaks the truth whether it is good or bad, because the mirror does not lie. Visual imagery is portrayed in the poem because it displays an insight of what the woman sees in the mirror. “Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully” (Plath l 10,13). The quotation illustrates...
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...Espinoza, Anita Stanford Searle English 102 Spring 2014 June 1, 2014 Paper 5 The Confessional Poet, Sylva Plath Sylva Plath was a pioneer who never got to see the results of her writings. She led a tormented life which was reflected in all her poems. She lost her father at age eight and never recovered from it. From the first to last of her published writings, Sylvia Plath what was later to be named as a confessional poet. This term did not exist while she was alive. Although she died at an early age, she has contributed much to the literary world. She had many confessional themes in her pieces. The main theme was resentment. The reading audience of her time was not a great change in which we looked at literature in a different light. No longer did it have to be fluff but literature could take a stance on current events or personal tragedies. People began to relate on a more intimate level. This sparked a new interest in literature. We will see how the term confessional poet relates to Sylvia Plath and how it applies to her poetry. A confessional poet by definition is a poet whose work lies in their own personal experiences. Sylvia used her life experiences to no so much relay her resentments about many of the injustices she felt in her life. She did not lay blame just expressed her emotions and opinions about certain times in her life. During the 1960’s, she was the first to do this and was not widely received at first. It was not until after her death that she was recognized...
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...Sylvia Plath had a life full of ups and downs. Her lifelong battle with multiple different illnesses is what made her career but also ended it at the same time. Using her research along with the research of other Dr. Jamison was able to make a “literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association, not to say actual overlap, between two temperaments--the artistic and the manic-depressive—and their relationship to the rhythms and cycles, or temperament, of the natural world.” Plath is just one poet among an extensive list of poets that have suffered from this illness (Butscher 385). Sylvia Plath was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath on October 27, 1932 in Boston Massachusetts. Plath’s father who was a professor at Boston University, the school Plath’s mom was attending, took a bus, boat, and trolley to get to work every morning (Steinberg, “A Celebration”). This dedication proves that Otto...
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...A prominent figure of modern American literature, confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, works hold grand significance, for it lead to the probe of a feminist-martyr to patriarchal society, sex-based roles, and psychiatric care. Noted for the blend of intense imagery and humorous use of alliteration and rhyme, Plath associating her works with her personal battles of anguish and depression, further solidified her mark on American history. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Winthrop, Massachusetts, to an academically well-established family. Her father died when she was eight, marking the beginning of her lifelong internal battles of depression, hence her poem Daddy. Ambitiously driven and exceptional student, from a young age she kept journals, published poems in reginal magazines and newspapers. She later attended Smith and Cambridge University, where she met and married the poet, Ted Hughes, birthing two children. Throughout her life, Plath suffered deep depression and...
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...Jessica Sutherland English 1102 What Does Internal Mean to Eternal Man? The poem “Fever 103°”, written by Sylvia Plath, reveals competing satire and radical takes on the poem. A formal analysis and reader-response will explore the poems two meanings and how they are shaped and built within the work. The work in short is an expression of sex and sensuality versus safe guarding ones purity and oneself. As it opens with Cerberus at the gates of hell, unable to lick clean the feverish tendon, then to love as in the smell of a snuffed candle, next to the smoke breaking the speaker’s neck. The poem continues to compare adulterers to devilish leopards, but in the next stanza she pleads and her sheets grow heavy. The elements of allusion, diction and, imagery come together to highlight the poem’s ambiguity. Its ambiguity, the two views of taking the poem as the speaker being straight forward in presenting the celibate as more godly, and as a result the impure unworthy of them, and the perspective that the speakers god-complex and displayed self-importance is satire to mock the pure who find themselves so mighty. The two takes on the work are hidden from another once it is read within the internal perspective view of the reader. “Fever 103°” is a poem of two foils chosen to created make a mockery of the reader, the views are pinned together to show the human self-servient manner to choose what gives them self-justification...
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...True Confessions In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphors” there are several references and comparisons that are made between various images and pregnancy. Plath’s life experiences and the perception of women’s roles of the 1950’s shaped her poems and was of particular importance in this poem. As the poem progresses, the reader can infer that her attitude towards her pregnancy is not static. Through her ironic use of various metaphors, Plath is able to convey her feelings of bearing a child, and how her perception and emotions of herself change over the course of her pregnancy. Plath was born in 1932 the first child of Otto and Aurelia Plath in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents “demanded superior academic performance” and this resulted in Plath...
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...The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath is about her life and how she lived in a male dominated world. There are many allusions within the poem and how she compares historical events to her own experiences. The first example of allusion is the entire poem and how Sylvia’s past has haunted her. She talks about how she was abused as a child and how her father treated her like a prisoner. She refers to her father as a “Nazi” and herself as a “Jew”, throughout the poem she talks about the significant events that happened in World War 2 such as the concentration camps in Auschwitz and how she feels that she is being kept imprisoned as a Jew in a concentration camp as well as her father acting like a Nazi would towards a Jew. The second example of allusion...
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...Cryptically confronting and subtly depressive, Sylvia Plath’s poetry caught the minds of young writers and poetry enthusiasts whilst disgruntling older, more traditional generations of poetry readers. Her use of imagery depicting a world tarnished, the war of a dysfunctional family and a depressive mind and imagination took the poetry world by storm and even after 55 years, Sylvia Plath is a prominent figure throughout the world of literature. Plath’s work is heavily influenced by, and imbedded in, the confessional poetry movement. A movement between the 1950’s and 60’s, that witnessed the rise of personal or first person writing, “I”, and highly private or emotional subject matter such as trauma, death and depression, all of which can be found in much of Plath’s writing. This element of her work, already ‘outrageous’ for many was heightened by the fact that she was a woman. This movement allowed her to openly and bluntly address and express the outrage she and many other women felt to the periods’ societal and gender norms. Her use of language and poetic technique are lost when not read aloud, most prominently in “daddy” where the poem takes on a sing-song, lullaby rhythm that amplifies the meaning and connotations within...
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...Sylvia Plath and Her Poetry Sylvia Plath was a short story writer and poet who was mostly known for her collections of poetry. Plath is considered the emancipator of “confessional poetry”: poetry that focuses around personal trauma (“A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry”). In her lifetime, she wrote many poems that were gathered together into seven collections; only one of them published before she committed suicide in 1963. It was very obvious that the struggles in Plath’s life such as the passing of her father, her severe depression, and a vicious divorce, heavily influenced her poetry (Mays). Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27th, 1932. Her mother was a student at Boston University and her father was a German immigrant...
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...In Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy”, Plath explores resentment, fear, and abuse in a father and daughter relationship. Throughout the poem, it is discovered that the narrator is describing a corrupt relationship with her father; comparing him to disturbing things such as a nazi, devil, Hitler, and eventually her husband. It is evident that the speaker is struggling to get over his memory and the destruction he brought in her life. The strong emotion of anger and fear of her father is presented in an unsettling way. By the end of the poem, readers can start to see the victims desire for real freedom from her father's wicked ways. Sylvia Plath uses literary devices such as metaphors and imagery to highlight the significance of the disturbing behavior and relationship the father had with the speaker. The use of imagery within the poem gives a base that allows readers to imagine the appalling events in the speakers life. The speaker uses imagery to describe her father as a “ghastly statue with one gray toe” (Plath, 1962). Plath uses the word “ghastly” to emphasize the horror and fear he brought into her life. She describes the statue stretching from the atlantic to the pacific ocean. This gives readers a...
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