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Theme of death in sylvia plath's poetry
Theme of death in poetry of sylvia plath and emily dickinson
Essay on Sylvia Plath
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By the mid twentieth century, the dominance of post-modernist literature began to decline with the emergence of contemporary poets, who brought with them a new type of perspective within their poetry. These poets—especially those who wrote confessional poetry—established their poetry in a single, unified voice that accentuated intimate human topics such as death, sexuality, and family. An important contributor to contemporary and confessional poetry was Sylvia Plath, who employed personal aspects of her life into her style of confessional poetry. Plath suffered from a deep depression that influenced her to often write in a dark, melancholy style. 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. Authors of this time, who ardently resented the suppression of freedom, brought about the contemporary poetry movement. This movement became a "series of attempts to reinterpret the relationship of man's inner world to the perceptual universe" (Malkoff 3). This reinterpretation led to poetry which concentrated on destroying man's individual ego and focusing on objects and situations perceived. Th...
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.... 10: 42. APA. American Psychological Association, Nov. 2003. Web. 03 Apr. 2011.
Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: the Woman and the Work. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Print.
Hamilton, Ian. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.
Kirk, Connie Ann. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Print.
Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita. "Sylvia Plath's Psychic Landscapes." English Studies 71.6 (1990): 509-22. Gale Database. The Gale Group, 1999. Web. 13 Mar. 2011.
Malkoff, Karl. Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Crowell, 1973. Print.
Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Print.
Uroff, M. D. "Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration." Iowa Review 8.1 (1977): 104-15. Gale Database. The Gale Group, 1999. Web. 13 Mar. 2011.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962. 430 Ed. Karen V. Kukil. Transcribed from the original manuscripts at Smith College. New York: Anchor, 2000.
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Sylvia Plath (American author)." 23 September 2013. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 9 April 2014 .
Wagner, Linda W., ed. Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1984.
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.
Wanger-Martin, Linda. "Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)." Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. George B. Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. Vol. 1. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 850. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
"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
The highly recognized female novelist and poet, Sylvia Plath, lived a hard and tragic life. Plath was diagnosed with depression, a mood disorder that causes consistent feelings of sadness, at a very young age that made her life complicated in many ways. The battle continued on when she was diagnosed with severe depression later on in life which contributed to her death. Sylvia Plath was a very successful novelist and poet in the thirty short years of her life, however, the achievements were not enough to mask her depression battle that ran and ended her life.
Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.
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.
1 Modern Poetry. Third Edition. Norton. I am a naysayer. 2003. The 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the Williams, William.
The Troubled Consciousness of Sylvia Plath as seen in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”
Kehoe, John. "Young, Talented, And Doomed: The Life Of Sylvia Plath." Biography 3.5 (1999): 88. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
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.
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.
Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature Fall 1996: 370-90. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.