The Broken Heart of Sylvia Plath

This depression included two suicide attempts of which she wrote before succeeding in suicide at the age of 30. An important facet of Plath's poetry was the distinctive development of the speaker, who, in her poem "Gigolo," for example, conveyed distinct and vivid experiences. Through her poetry, Plath sought freedom from society and her inward sense of entrapment. While some critics question Plath's intense incorporation of sorrow more than confession within many of her poems, few can doubt that Plath's morbid but intensely personal style contributed to the rise of confessional poetry as a genre. At the end of World War II, the pursuit for in all mediums of human life no longer took precedent.

Hollowness in Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Discourse Much has been said about Emily Dickinson’s mystifying poetry and private life, especially during the years 1860-63. Allegedly it was during these years that the poetess, at the most prolific phase of her career, withdrew from society, began to wear her “characteristic” white dress and suffered a series of psychotic episodes. Dickinson tended to “theatricalize” herself by speaking through a host of personae in her poems and by “fictionalizing” her inner life as a gothic romance (Gilbert 584). Believing that a poem is “the best words in the best order” (to quote S.T. Coleridge) and that all the poems stemming from a single consciousness bring to surface different aspects / manifestations of the same personal mythology, I will firstly disregard biographical details in my interpretation of Dickinson’s poems 378, 341 and 280 and secondly place them in a sort of “continuum” (starting with 378 and ending with 280) to show how they attempt to describe a “plunge” into the Unconscious and a lapse into madness (I refrain from using the term “journey,” for it implies a “telos,” a goal which, whether unattainable or not, is something non-existent in the poems in question).

Centuries ago, ... ... middle of paper ... ...lso used poetry as a way to deal with death, in her spiritual, and physical life to help her find peace. (Ford P.227) Both poems are very similar and represent an idea of searching for what death is and means, in a world of silence and stillness. Both poems try to be inconclusive and call to question what death is? Although many writers try to dive into the mind of Dickinson the way that she leaves so many ideas and room to explore, the poems are a great way to look at death itself Works Cited Bachinger, Katrina. "Dickinson's I Heard a Fly Buzz."

1998. New York: Vintage International; New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1962. Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Although Parker has many supporters and role models, such as Martin Luther King Jr., she frequently writes metaphors about her failed suicide attempts. Despite her success in writing and as well as the movie business, fifteen movies have been attributed in her name since before and now after her death, she was always alone, always unseen. She describes this pain in “Resume” as she tells the reader all they ways she has attempted suicide and yet she jokes , “you might as well live”(Parker). Parker points out that life is easier than finding the escape from it, she suggests that nothing can stand up to the will one has for oneself and even though she has made mistakes and has danced with the devil quite a few times she concludes that the pain of taking a life is not worth a single effort. “Resume” is essentially a list of ideas against suicide, and by the end of the poem Parker proposes to the reader that there are no positives to the situation at hand and that one should just give up now.

Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979. Smith, Pamela. "Architectonics: Sylvia Plath's Colossus." in Butscher, Edward, ed.

Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed.

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1993. 203-24. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath.

Ariel: Anxiety For Freedom Sylvia Plath's poems are so intervened with her life that it is difficult to separate them. Her poems, she said in an interview she gave to Peter Orr in October 1962, a few months before her suicide that they come out immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experience she had. Therefore, she decried the cries of heart informed by nothing “except a needle or a knife” (Orr 169). This applies to her last volume Ariel as well. In the same interview she said that one should be able to control and manipulate those experiences, even the most terrified with intelligent mind.

So instead of sitting ... ... middle of paper ... ...I read about her life, I can see that it was more than that. It was about how she felt and how she wanted to express her feelings. She went through great depression after her father died and this poem shows that. She tried killing herself to get to him.