Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath was the first person to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1982,and she is well known for her poems “daddy”. Sadly Plath committed suicide,but before she killed herself she left a note for one of her neighbors to tell them to get a doctor and when they found her she was lying in the oven with wet towels covering the door so her children wouldn't die from the gas to. Plath’s husband Hughes published most of her poems or novels that weren’t published because she had committed suicide at such an early age. It’s because of Hughes publishing her works that she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 but she was too late for her to claim it because she was dead 20 something years or so. Plath achieved this from studying with the one and only Robert Lowwell which she made her famous Colossus

Sylvia Plath was an American author and poet. Her death at the age of 30 by suicide was the end of her long struggle with mental illness throughout her life, chronicled in her most famous work, her fictional, but inspired by her life novel, The Bell Jar, cited for its feminist themes and exploration of mental illness. Plath is considered one of the greatest poets and novelists of the 20th century, whose works were influenced by her mental illnesses, and still have relevance today.

Sylvia Plath’s style has 3 to 5 line stanzas, many poems have short lines, and very descriptive writing and vocabulary, there are many poems with rhyme, and many use punctuation for phrasing of the poems. Many of her poems are confessional poems. Plath often tells stories in a way that readers can relate. She adds rhyme throughout her poems at the right moment and pulls the reader in. Some themes that are reoccurring are emotions, anger, relationships, and death. Her poems reflect her depression and life experiences.

Sylvia Plath is a “confessional” who puts her own experiences in her works that were written during the eighteen century. Sylvia Plath was diagnosed with depression, but recovered when she first attempted suicide in college. In her marriage to Ted Hughes she fell back into depression, which led her to attempt suicide and again this time she died .During the twentieth century, women in American culture were treated as objects without a voice, and male dominance suppressed them. Plath uses allusion, symbolism and metaphors throughout her poems “Tulips” and “Cut” to demonstrate the theme of women in American culture.

Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin had very different outlooks on life and the purpose of life, Plath very much injected her personal experiences into her writing and was a passionate poet. Larkin was arguably a more realistic and observant poet, which in turn made him more pessimistic. Both poets explore the theme of fulfilment, Plath specifically through her poems ‘Morning Song’ and ‘Letters in November’, featured in her 1965 posthumous collection ‘Ariel’ and Larkin through his poems ‘Faith Healing’ and ‘Self’s the Man’, published in his 1964 collection ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. Plath achieves her sense of fulfilment from her domesticated lifestyle, whereas it is clear in his writing that Larkin dislikes the, in his view, tedious nature of the domestic life. Plath cherishes her family relationships and receives joy from them, while Larkin has a dismissive view of family life. It can be argued that in this sense, Larkin is less fulfilled compared to Plath. However it can also be stated that Larkin is less reliant on others to fuel his happiness, he is perhaps more contented within himself and more independent in his life.

In the world of poetry, it is a commonly known fact that Sylvia Plath had a tendency to express her fascination with death and various other extremely dark, heavy, and morbid topics in a myriad of her works. The intensely personal and somewhat taboo topics that are found in her poems can sometimes be tremendously challenging for people to face, but Plath’s supreme writing ability allowed her to write about such subjects in a way that made readers unable to look away from the page. This idea is especially true in her persona poem “Lady Lazarus,” which deals with the morose matter of mental illness and suicide. In this poem, Plath has the speaker, Lady Lazarus, describe her previous and future experiences with death and resurrection. Lady Lazarus is unafraid of and seems to completely embrace death, almost to the point where she takes pleasure in it, and she abhors how her resurrection is made into a theatrical show and a science experiment. For most of the poem, themes of suffering and death are present, but as the poem nears the end, a more positive theme of empowerment arises. To express the speaker’s innermost feelings concerning suffering from oppression and depression, Plath utilizes unique form, unorthodox rhythm and rhyme, and unbelievably violent, gory, and horrific images of death associated with the treatment of Jewish people during the time of the Holocaust, and she does so, spectacularly.

Although once Plath had gotten older she moved to England, certainly her time in Winthrop affected her life and poetry.  Her father, Otto Plath, was a German professor of Biology, an entomologist, and also authored a book about bees; which would later become the subject of many of Plath's later poems. Her mother, Aurelia Plath was pursuing a career in teaching when she met Sylvia's father. At the age of eight, Sylvia Plath published her first poem, her father would die in Winthrop, that same year. This would be the start of her lifelong career as a poet. Plath lived and wrote in the 1950s through the 1960s in both America and England (Bawer). As a modern period poet and feminist, growing up during WWII, some of Plath's work was directly related to the issues that were developing in society at the time. After WWII, societies were often characterized by strict gender norms. Women were expected to remain safely in their homes, with being a wife and a mother as their ultimate joy and goal. Art and expression became away from women to escape the everyday pressures of society.

“Lady Lazarus” is a poem by Sylvia Plath, written in 1962 shortly before her death in early 1963, and published posthumously by her husband, poet Ted Hughes, in 1965 in the collected volume Ariel. “Lady Lazarus” is a poem about suicide as a rebirth, and was in part inspired by Plath's own life and draws heavily on Plath's lifelong struggle with bipolar depression and suicidal feelings, and uses holocaust imagery to paint a bleak portrait of suicide and hopelessness.

February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath sealed the rooms between her and her children and committed suicide. Plath placed her head in a gas oven, she was found dead in her own kitchen. (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine – 2003 and Academy of American Poets - 2013). After Plath’s death Ted Hughes became her

Death plays a huge role in Sylvia Plath’s poetry; she reveals it in different ways. The main common theme is the emptiness gone by her father’s death at the age of eight. She speaks about his death and burial remembering that she is forever separated from the love of her father. As Plath suffered most of her adult life from being depressed, It’s said to be that Sylvia Plath’s

Regarded as one of the most famous confessional poets of the 20th century, Sylvia Plath’s romance with death has captivated the attention of a multitude of readers, but unfortunately, like most distinguished authors, the height of her fame occurred after her death. In The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick observes that much of Plath’s success was due to the fact that “no one went as far as she did” and no writer was ever as raw and destructive as Plath was. (Hardwick). Her brutal and autobiographical works often explore her own mental instability, unresolved issues with her parents, and her failed marriage to fellow poet, Ted Hughes. Despite the depression that is rooted in the vast majority of her writing, Plath was a brilliant young woman who was determined to master everything that life had to offer. However, perfectionism was soon proven to be her downfall.

Her poetry was known as a confessional type, typically based on her innermost feelings and thoughts, with a twist for the dramatic and sensationalism (“Sylvia Plath,” Biography.com). She also wrote one novel, The Bell Jar, a dark literary work said to parallel much of her own life. In a forward to The Bell Jar, written by Frances McCullough, McCullough states “Although her illness was never diagnosed, several researchers in the field have noted Plath’s unerring description of schizophrenic perception…” (xvi). Perhaps this condition had something to do with Plath’s early demise, for it was not long after publication of The Bell Jar, that Plath made the decision to take her own life.

As time progressed, Plath fought many inner, deep battles within herself, which involved marriage, sexuality, chastity, and her career, thus leading to her mental breakdown. Her morale did not improve any further or at all when she was rejected from a summer writing course at Harvard. On April 1, 1960, her daughter, Freida was born. Now that she had a child, she found very little time to write. She felt like there was no exit and that she was being held down with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to. To make matters worse, her husband, Ted Hughes, kept publishing articles, poems, and books. By Hughes continuation of publication, he was indirectly rubbing it in Plath’s face. With Plath’s deteriorating health and severe depression, she had a miscarriage while pregnant with her second child in February of 1961. The following year, she tried for another, and her son Nicholas Farr was born. Meanwhile,

Sylvia Plath is a well known and adroit poet who is recognized for many of her writings including her book ,Ariel, as well as her peculiar interest toward death. Married to Ted Hughes, Plath became the mother of two and wrote many poems during this time period. In addition, she kept a record of journals which can be seen in her book, The Bell Jar (Steinberg). However, many of her poems contain aspects that have a parallel connection to Plath’s personal life. Furthermore, Plath’s life was substantially shaped by the love she had for her family and the depression she faced throughout her life which can be seen in her writings “Daddy”, “Pursuit”, and “Death & Co”.

In her poetry, the reader can often forget that Plath is not the speaker. This is because in her poems, “there is no slippage between the poet and the voice of the poem” (Kendall 14). The topic of death was not a common theme in poetry at the time Plath was writing. Both of these aspects of her poetry are what make her writing stand out. In almost all of her works, a reader can find a reference to death. More importantly, a reader can find Plath’s thoughts about death and how she views it. That is what classifies her works as confessional poetry.