It is difficult not to read Hughes’s and Plath’s poetry in relation to each other due to their intimate relationship and their support for each other’s career during their marriage. In Plath’s journals she wrote “All my pat theories against marrying a writer dissolve with Ted: his rejections more than double my sorrow & his acceptances rejoice me more than mine,” thus showing that they shared each other’s goals in life (Hampl 1995: 4). In a BBC interview with both Hughes and Plath, Hughes said that “he and Plath have ‘a single, shared mind,’ ‘a telepathic union’ that was ‘a source of great deal’ in his poetry,” whereas Plath said that she thought “all the poems [they] wrote to each other and about each other were really before [their] marriage.” …show more content…
‘The Thought Fox’ is made up of six unrhymed quatrains and uses punctuation to differentiate from the room in which the speaker is writing, in lines 1 to 4, and then to the fox outside in the snow, which is one continuous sentence from line 5 through to 22. This difference in form could be an indication of how the different stages and events through Hughes’s life affected his writing. ‘The Thought Fox’ is significantly less violent and bleak compared to the poems within ‘Crow’, the fox is timid and “sets neat prints into the snow” as though the idea of the poem crept up on Hughes, it suggests a period of intrigue and even procrastination as the speaker is awake at “midnight” with a “blank page” (Longley 2010: …show more content…
The inventive imagery within Plath’s poetry allows the reader an insight into her frame of mind, and though she could be seen as a confessional poet through the specific details that she includes from her own life, we do see how she has manipulated these events and characters within her poems to realise the outcome she desires, as seen in ‘Lady Lazarus’. But even when she is not directly referring to a personal detail, the reader is still able to interpret the speaker’s emotions within poems, and in many instances correlate them to Plath’s own feelings. Despite this, it is difficult to separate Plath’s poetry from the circumstances of her tragic death, and thus the reader imprints their own idea of how Plath might have felt whilst writing her later poetry. This also applies to Hughes, after Plath’s suicide, when his poetry became raw and macabre with the birth of ‘Crow’, and though Hughes is not deemed a biographical poet in the way that Plath is, his poetry does portray his emotions just as strongly as Plath’s does. He too uses imagery and form to capture the grim violence within the collection. The reader can deduce the fragile emotional state that Hughes had to endure through a difficult period of his life through the character of ‘Crow’ within his poems. When reading the poetry that Plath produced just prior
While studying in England, Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes, an English poet. Plath married Hughes on December 7, 1956. Plath and Hughes moved back to the United States in 1957. While in the country, Plath worked as a professor at Smith College teaching English Language and Literature; however in 1959, Plath gave up teaching and moved back to England to continue her writing. In 1960, Hughes and Plath had their first child, Frieda. Two years later, the couple had their son Nicholas. The same year Nicholas was born, Hughes left Plath for another woman. Hughes affair greatly impacted Plath’s writing as well as her other relationships with men such as her father’s. (Smithipedia)
Plath’s works were known for their extremely feminist and suicidal themes. Plath wrote about whatever came to her mind and used writing as a way to express her feelings. Plath is credited with furthering the genre of confessional poetry. Plath was also the first poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize after death. Although Plath had taken her life, her legacy still lives on in many ways.
Poetry is the wind for a trapped and wounded soul. A great example of a wounded soul is, Sylvia Plath. She was an immaculate poet, who expressed her personal troubles through writing. As Plath’s life smouldered into a heap of dust at the age of 30, her poetry grew and bloomed. In the years before her death, her most troubled period, Plath penned three of her most well-known poems, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “Tulips”—all three illustrating the horrors of despair with strong, expressive literary devices. Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, has been hailed ubiquitously as one of the most acclaimed and preeminent poets of the 21st century. Plath’s poetry was influenced by tragic events in her life and her prolonged battle against her deep depression and obsession with death. Plath’s personal issues made her the definition of a confessional poet. In the poems, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, and “Lady Lazarus”, Plath confesses her emotional and nervous breakdowns during her endless depression.
Plath is a very personal poet. She also uses symbolism throughout the majority of her poetry and prose. Plath writes based on everyday occurrences during her lifetime. Most of her work is actually diary entries without punctuation. Plath gets most of her inspiration from her everyday life. She enjoyed writing about the things that happened day to day.
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
Initially, the poem appears to be about an observer forming a connection with a blackbird that he encounters many times. Then the reader realizes that the poem is by Stevens and something else must be going on- and they are correct. In order to see the entire picture, it is very important to look at the bits and pieces that create it. The meaning of each individual part, the setting, the usage of literary devices such as distinct symbolism, and versatile thematic messages are all very important in creating a clear understanding. The path has been laid out, now it is time to shred this work into pieces!
In order for a person to really understand how Mr. Hughes’s life shaped his poetry, one must know all about his background. In this paper, I will write a short biography of Hughes’s life and tell how this helped accent his literary genius.
Plath and Sexton's lifetimes spanned a period of remarkable change in the social role of women in America, and both are obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With few established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their agonizing personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. However, although their poems, such as Plath's "Daddy" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," deal with the authors' private experiences, they retain elements of universality; their language cuts through a layer of individual perspective to reach a current of raw emotion common to all human, but especially female, understanding.
As England’s Poet Laureate, and recipient of both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and T.S. Eliot’s prize for poetry, Ted Hughes was an acclaimed poet. The shadow of Hughes late wife, Sylvia Plath, kept Hughes stagnant in his career, in which he was known as “Her Husband” (Middlebrook). Hughes most recent collection of poems, Birthday Letters, took him over twenty-five years to write, and contains poems which recount the marriage of the couple. Hughes wrote the poems as a loving gesture towards Sylvia, but the poems were misinterpreted as “an attempt to adjust the public record in the wake of her confession and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them” (Spurr 3). Hughes incorporated into his poetry the ideals of postmodernism, his somber life and relationships, simplistic formatting, imagery, and allusions. Hughes influenced the world through his animal images and multifarious tones.
It is possible that the suicidal process set off before Sarah Kane started to write her best play and before Sylvia Plath wrote the best poems of her life. They might have been either created in an attempt to set the suicidal process back (Viewegh, 1996) or as a pure manifestation of this suicidal process which might have brought about sudden burst of strong internal creative powers. In both cases we might take these works as suicide notes and poetic accounts on a dramatic search for the meaning of life and existence.
“Spinster” by Sylvia Plath is a poem that consists of a persona, who in other words serves as a “second self” for the author and conveys her innermost feelings. The poem was written in 1956, the same year as Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, who was also a poet. The title suggests that the persona is one who is not fond of marriage and the normal rituals of courtship as a spinster is an unmarried woman, typically an older woman who is beyond the usual age of marriage and may never marry. The persona of the poem is a woman who dislikes disorder and chaos and finds relationships to be as unpredictable as the season of spring, in which there is no sense of uniformity. In this poem, Plath not only uses a persona to disclose her feelings, but also juxtaposes the seasons and their order (or lack thereof) and relates them to the order that comes with solitude and the disorder that is attributed with relationships. She accomplishes this through her use of formal diction, which ties into both the meticulous structure and develops the visual imagery.
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.
After reading the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and doing some research on Plath, I came to find out that the poem was very similar to Plath’s personal life. The poem is basically about a young girl who fell in love and gave her all to a boy who never came back to love her. The young girl fell in a depression and made herself believe that she was making it all up. She still had hope that she and the boy could be happy someday, but it never happened and it drove her insane. Perhaps the boy could have been Plath’s husband, Hughes. Everything about the poem is so similar to her marriage with Hughes; the story makes the reader believe the poem could possibly be about Plath herself.
Plaths Poetry can be understood through the psychoanalytic model. The motifs of oral fixation, sadomasochism and the desire to return to primary narcissism are consistent throughout Plaths Poetry. Overall these motifs represent the desire to return to the state of primary narcissism and to be reunited with the incestuous love object.
Plath’s father died early in her life leaving her with unresolved feelings, and this brought a lot of troubles later on in life. Sylvia was a great student but when she was overwhelmed with disappointments after a month in New York, she attempted suicide (“Sylvia Plath”). After receiving treatment and recovering, she returned to school and later moved to England where she met her future husband, Ted Hughes (“Sylvia Plath”). Their marriage with two children didn’t last when Ted had an affair. They separated and Ted moved in with the new woman, leaving Sylvia and their two children. Battling depression during this time, Sylvia soon ended her life. She left behind numerous writings that many might see as signs of her depression and suicide attempts.