Sylvia Plath Essays

Sylvia Plath was a remarkable twentieth century American poet. Her poetry focused on depression, suicide, death, and self-destruction. Poetry to Plath was her escape and her way of dealing with her problems and self-loathing feelings. If the person to read Sylvia Plath’s poems, s/he will notice that most of her subjects are very depressing. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932. When Sylvia was only eight, her father died of diabetes. At the same age, Plath started her career as a writer. At

According to Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath, an extraordinary yet discouraging poet who has published pieces of poetry that have a heartbreaking quality about them. I agree, simply because it is in fact true. Plath has had a disturbing history of imagery situated in her poems. “Mirror,” “The Times are Tidy,” “Child,” “Poppies in July,” and many more. Within in one of my favorite poems, “Mirror,” Plath experiments by telling the hidden story of this piece of poetry in the mirror’s point of view

Mirror Analysis Sylvia Plath was never one to shy away from dark subjects in her writing. As part of the Confessional Poetry Movement – also known as, “Poetry of the Personal” – most of her poems held subject matter that was not openly discussed in literature at the time. Plath, and other poets of the movement wrote about personal experiences, feelings about death, trauma, and depression. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror”, is no different. The themes in this poem don’t really attempt to hide themselves

“IT WAS A QUEER, SULTRY SUMMER, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” This is the first sentence of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. This autobiographical book follows the life of Esther Greenwood, she wins a junior editor on a magazine and goes to New York for a month and works for a woman named Jay Cee. She doesn’t know why she is in New York because she is not having the fun she should be. Her along with eleven other girls are living in a woman’s

The collective body of Sylvia Plath 's poetry demonstrates definitively her mastery of her craft. Plath has been criticized for her overtly autobiographical work and her suicidal pessimism, however, close study reveals that her poetry transcends categorization and has a voice uniquely her own. As Katha Pollit concluded in a 1982 Nation review, "by the time she came to write her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other voice like hers on earth" (Wagner 1). In works such as "Lady Lazarus,"

Sylvia Plath “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” These are the words of Sylvia Plath reflecting not only her poetry and writing style, but moods, history, and life. She rose to fame after WWII for her poetry and suicide. Her startling poems focus on reflection and often have a depressing tone. [In conclusion,] Sylvia´s poetry was excellent, creative, and dark, influenced by her past. Plath

Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” speaks of Plath’s failed suicide attempts and the concept of death. The poem itself is extremely personal and terribly dark. Through diction, figurative language and tone Plath is able to convey the idea in which she is a female version of Lazarus, hence the title of her poem, criticizing how society has treated her and her own self-portrait. Right off the bat, Plath masks the theme of death. In the first tercet Plath confesses that she has “done it again” and every

Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath shows the story of a woman who seems troubled by her life. The speaker of the poem is very melancholic and talks about incidences where she attempted suicide. Lady Lazarus claims to die every decade and has already hit her third “death,” showing her age of thirty. The idea of revival is being played within the poem to cover the fact that she attempted suicide but failed. She may belittle herself at times throughout the poem but shows that she is a strong hearted woman. Plath creates

The Bell Jar, written by the Sylvia Plath, follows Ester Greenwood’s decent into and recovery from madness. Esther is a young and brilliant writer, whose ambitions are stunted by a crippling depression. Plath, through Esther, describes an outlook on reality that is distorted by mental illness through the symbolism of the fig tree and the bell jar. Indirect characterization of Esther also gives a perspective of this distorted reality. Though she wants to move forward, her state of mind holds her back

The Bell Jar While New York City is a city of hopes, dreams, fame, shining lights, and parties, Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, explains that is not the case for her main character, Esther. Plath replaces the glamour of New York City with isolation; therefore, the title is a direct representation of Esther’s mental suffocation. Esther also demonstrates the difficulty of a teenage girl attempting to chase her dreams, but ultimately gets confused and emotional about what she wants to do with

Sylvia Plath: A Biography "Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You 've got to go so far, so fast in such a small space; you 've got to burn away all the peripherals." -Sylvia Plath You 've probably heard that name before, Sylvia Plath. She was an American poet and a novelist, popular for her collections of poetry and for her book, The Bell Jar. She is a poetic icon . She is also a symbol of depression and the battle one may face with this illness, she is also known for her suicide. Sylvia

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath is a daughter’s overdue words to her dead father. As a vessel for the speaker’s emotional outbreak, the poem alternates among her idolation and fear, and her love and rejection for him, feelings that she constantly struggles between. The work reveals the destructive nature of the memory of the speaker’s father, and portrays her final attempt to break free of its shadow. The poem is one big apostrophe directed at the speaker’s dead father, and in doing so she regresses into

The poetry of Sylvia Plath is shrouded in a heavy veil of figurative language and is often accompanied by her grief, producing themes of a harrowing darkness throughout many of her poems. In one of her most famous poems, “Daddy,” it is clear that Plath draws upon her own life experiences. Weaving in her deep, explosive, and even despondent emotions into the lines of the poem, Plath creates a familiar framework of grief and bitterness. However, Plath leaves no poem ordinary; the unofficial queen

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical novel in which Plath relays her own experiences through protagonist Esther Greenwood by highlighting the struggles she faced in navigating societal expectations, depression, and her own desires. Having spent time in college and later in multiple mental health institutions, Plath tells her story through Esther in a way that blends fiction and reality. Through Esther, we see Plath’s own interpretations of her triumphs, failures, values, and the

What is the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think of a sow? Typically, they just think of a pig on a farm and never think that they would have to read about it in a poem. Sylvia Plath followed an unusual path when she created an intriguing piece titled “Sow”. We all have our own unique opinions that we are able to express, for the most part, whenever and wherever we want. Through Plath’s poem, we are presented with two very different points of view on a pig. On one hand

Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes and had two children with him. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life and she died after committing suicide in 1963. She used to openly discuss her depression with the poet Robert Lowell and her suicide attempts with Anne Sexton. Both of them led her to write from a more female

solitude that weighs so heavily on its author. In this poem, Plath alludes to Lazarus, a man who Jesus resurrects from the dead. Plath is in fact the female foil to this biblical figure, and through the chaos and loneliness her husband, father, and friends cultivate, she is ultimately driven to suicide. However, despite her attempts, the poet unfailingly rises from her deathbed to confront an increasingly harsher world. Similar to Plath, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell introduces themes of turmoil

straightforward language. Simple and straightforward language is not necessarily one with no figurative or deeper meaning, but is language that does not require extensive analysis to seek out its meaning. In her confessional novel, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath describes Esther Greenwood’s journey of overcoming her mental illness, and through Esther, demonstrates her concerns about mental illness, the flawed treatments of the 1950s, and the stigmas regarding it. I strongly agree that in the case of The

Sylvia Plath, Wilfred Owen and Emily Dickinson use a wide variety of techniques to explore the loss of identity, will and life. Plath, known as a confessional poet, suffered from severe depression for the majority of her short life. While Plath was a social commentator, Dickinson, a reclusive writer, wrote prolifically on her morbid fascination with death. Owen became an activist and anti-war poet following his traumatic time as a soldier in World War I. The theme of loss is a common thread found

How does Plath's assumed Jewish identity in her Ariel poems compare with the actual cultural experiences expressed in the poems of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks? Sylvia Plath’s collections of poems in her final book Ariel invokes strong images of what she was going through in the last months of her life. Nothing is stronger than the images referenced in the poem Daddy of what the Jewish people went through in the concentration camps during World War II. Using strong words such as: An engine