The Applicant Poem

The notion of truth being a defined reasoning and represented as a one sided argument is unmistakably how most audiences visualize it. The concept cannot be interpreted in such close mindedness, as to tell the truth is to speak what appears “truthful” to “you”. Conflicting perspectives arise when the visualization of how feasible or veracious something is differs between individuals. The controversy surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, contentious poets of the twenty first century portray their own reality through their semi-confessional poetry. Sylvia Plath frequently extends her cereal obsession with her dead father as

After the affair Plath grew increasingly depressed and eventually committed suicide. He said that “Plaths death was inevitable, she had been on that track most of her life,” but he could not contend with the additional suicide of Wevill in 1969, which he said was “utterly within her power, and it was an outcome of her reaction to Sylvia’s action,” which led to Wevill’s suicide.” These past horrific experiences strongly affected Hughes future relationships and poetry.

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’s work is marked with her trademark style, one full of enigmatic analogies and ambiguous metaphors. Sadly though, the life of Sylvia Plath was indeed shorter than anyone expected. Nevertheless, in the thirty years Plath meandered through the world, she left an everlasting impact. Remembered as one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century, Plath cultivated a literary community unlike any predecessor. Additionally, since a sizable portion of Plath’s work was read posthumously, her suicide brought the much needed attention to physiological illnesses. Unfortunately though, Sylvia Plath will never know the perennial impact she left from her distinguished works that have touched numerous lives.

In Sylvia Plath’s infamous poem, “Daddy,” she gives us insight into the speaker’s relationship with her father. It may be difficult to understand their connection within the first few lines due to the murky, dark tones of the poem. Did the speaker hate her father, or did the speaker love him? After reading, the poem itself could be seen as a cry for help and to finally acknowledge how his death made the speaker feel. The speaker had lived 23 years of her life without her father, spending that time feeling lonely and trapped, confined within the mere eight years of memories she had with him before his passing. The poet created a powerful image of the speaker’s father using heavy metaphors to illustrate his authority and powerful influence. The speaker lashes out at her dead father in what can be called a “hate poem”, presumably because she feels abandoned by him after his death. The speaker remains elusive throughout the poem on whether she is done with his hold over her, or whether she’s finally gotten through to her father’s character and she now understands him. The poet displays the intricacies of a father-daughter relationship and all of its complexities through diction, metaphors, imagery and tone, creating a compelling piece that makes readers wonder whether there was any love involved.

In fact, Sylvia Plath’s depression, her relationship with Ted Hughes, and her German roots and culture are all reflected in her poetry. One aspect of Plath's life reflected in her poetry is her depression. Plath became depressed in 1953 when she learned she had not been accepted into

It is said that without melancholy there is no art, and there is no better embodiment of that than beloved poet and author, Sylvia Plath. Often referred to as one of the most dynamic poets of the 1900’s, Plath had no limits on her expression through poetry. Her poems ranged from flowing verses on nature to unconventional commentary on the social restrictions placed on individuals. She is most known for her poetic expression of her own mental anguish, never shying away from topics of death and despair.

The Victorian era was characterized by a patriarchal society that imposed strict ways of life and moral codes on its women. Because women were considered to have belonged primarily in the domestic realm, the traditional and ideal Victorian woman was the passive, pure, and virtuous “angel in the house.” Women were expected to maintain their virginity until marriage, and expressions of female sexuality or promiscuity were of moral outrage and came with serious consequences. Accordingly, Robert Browning uses this idea of female sexuality and its ramifications in several of his dramatic monologues. Close readings of Browning’s poems “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” demonstrate how Victorian women are empowered by expressions of their

As is inherent within the tradition of confessional poetry, a subgenre of lyric poetry which was most prominent from the fifties to the seventies (Moore), Sylvia Plath uses the events of her own tragic life as the basis of creating a persona in order to examine unusual relationships. An excellent example of this technique is Plath’s poem “Daddy” from 1962, in which she skilfully manipulates both diction, trope and, of course, rhetoric to create a character which, although separate from Plath herself, draws on aspects of her life to illustrate and make points about destructive, interhuman relations. Firstly that of a father and daughter, but later also that of a wife and her unfaithful husband.

parents, and how she saw herself. Whether Plath wrote about nature or someone else, she

Sylvia Plath is well known for her rather obscure themes in her writing. One theme that appears in almost all of her poems is that of isolation from mankind and the world. In Plath’s case, isolation can also mean isolation from expression, from freedom, or from people. Plath’s poems “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Tulips” all express isolation through separate literary techniques such as metaphor, juxtaposition, and imagery

In American society, the common stereotype is that the father has the role of the dominant figure in the household. Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds may come across as two seemingly different poets, however, they are really quite similar, especially in their driving forces behind their writing styles in poetry. The lives of Plath and Olds are both expressive of the realities of a father-dominated family, in which both of these poets lost their fathers at a young age. This is significant because both poets have faced a similar traumatic event that has had everlasting effects on their adult womanhood, which is reflected in their writings. For both these woman, their accesses to father-daughter relationships were denied based on life

Although Sylvia’s ambiguous proclamation in Ariel enhanced her sense of self-empowerment, she continued to feel inferior to the male authoritative figures in her life, until 1956 when she met Ted Hughes. In her poem, Ode for Ted she demonstratively praises her new husband, characterizing him as a supreme individual of nature. Her perception of him steers closely to majestic, bestowing power and control unto him: “he with rock splits open/ knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen/ rich, brown, sudden in sunlight (10-12, Ode for Ted, Sylvia Plath)”. However, in the sense of male versus female superiority, this poem simultaneously degraded Ted Hughes by sparking a competition. Authors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar perceive women writers as “cherishing

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is well known for its deeply personal and emotional subject matter. Much of Plath’s poetry is confessional and divulges the most intimate parts of her psyche whether through metaphor or openly, without creating a persona through which to project her feelings, and through the use of intense imagery. Plath’s attempt to purge herself of the oppressive male figures in her life is one such deeply personal and fundamental theme in her poetry. In her poem, “Daddy”, which declares her hatred for her father and husband, this attempt is expressed through language, structure, and tone. (Perkins, 591)

Within the poem, Freeman, the visiting clergyman, fails to see the same beauty in the bull calf that the narrator sees. The narrator sees the bull calf as something as has its own innate worth – describing him as an animal with “the promise of sovereignty” (4) and comparing him to Richard II. However, despite this, for the