Sylvia Plath
(1932 - 1963)
(Also wrote under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas) American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, and scriptwriter.
Sylvia Plath: Introduction
Sylvia Plath: ...
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Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Author Sylvia Plath's association with death and madness stemmed from her confessional poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, and the facts of her life, but most of all from ...
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Biography EssayNow famous for her ritual flirtations with death, Sylvia Plath has emerged as a significant fig- ure in contemporary American literature in the two and a half decades since her suicide ...
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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), poet and novelist, explored her obsessions with death, self, and nature in works that expressed her ambivalent attitudes toward the universe.Sylvia Plath was born in Boston's...
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In "Three Women," the final poem of Winter Trees (1971), Sylvia Plath speaks through the voice of a woman in a maternity ward, whose words provide a fitting statement for the poet's singular fixation ...
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Although most of her creative energies were directed toward poetry, Sylvia Plath produced one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), a striking work which has contributed to her reputation as a significant figur...
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In his introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-62 (1982), her husband, poet Ted Hughes, wrote that she wore "many masks" but that he believes he knew her "real self" -- "the self I had marr...
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In the following essay, Harris compares Dickinson's response to death with that of poet Sylvia Plath, finding that Plath tends to be more explicit and Dickinson more transcendent in their attit...
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In the following essay, Scheerer traces Plath's rejection of mythic paradise—which she evokes using imagery of death—in her poetry.
Green alleys where we reveled have become The i...
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Critical Essay by George Steiner
It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as h...
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Critical Essay by A. E. Dyson
One immediately felt [reading The Colossus] a highly distinctive new voice, and sensibility—something cool, refreshing, healing, like the personality of the poet h...
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Critical Essay by Robert Boyers
Crossing The Water is an extraordinary book, not promising merely nor dazzling as one might have expected of a poet who was later to write the poems in Ariel, but perfe...
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Critical Essay by Gene Ballif
[I think] that the so called "religious" motifs of [Plath's] "Mystic" have nothing to do with religion or religious spirituality or the...
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Critical Essay by Lorna Sage
This selection [Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams], made by Ted Hughes, of Sylvia Plath's miscellaneous prose—published stories, articles, a few passages ...
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Critical Essay by Simon Blow
[Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams] is only of interest if discussing why Sylvia Plath should ever have wanted to write prose—so inferior (The Bell Jar included)...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Atwood
"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a minor work by a major writer…. [It will interest] any reader sympathetic enough to Plath's wor...
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Critical Essay by Arthur Oberg
[No] poet more than Sylvia Plath keeps reminding us of the terms and the ground of her writing. To say that she writes in extremis is not only an accurate statement of f...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Thwaite
That mystery and obfuscation, as well as pregnant misreading, have helped to create a Plath cult is undoubtedly true. That there is a cult-like interest in her life a...
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Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient
Sylvia Plath was a romantic of the most self-cancelling kind. She reduced romanticism to a fever, a scream of defiance; but romantic she was, and exactly to the degree...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Blackburn
It is difficult not to think of Ted Hughes (I mean, of course, some of his poems) when reading such an admirable invocation of exuberant, unparagraphed vitality as S...
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Critical Essay by Lynda B. Salamon
[Sylvia Plath's] is a sensibility disturbed, which sees reflected in the exterior world the very tensions, conflicts, and fears that haunt the inner spirit. H...
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Critical Essay by Peter Porter
Crossing the Water consists of poems written in 1960 and 1961, after The Colossus was published but before her final intense period of creation. It's important to...
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Critical Essay by Ann Birstein
I hadn't realized until recently … that Sylvia Plath had become something of a heroine of the feminist movement. The myth being, as I understood it, that h...
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Critical Essay by John Wain
Sylvia Plath writes clever, vivacious poetry, which will be enjoyed most by intelligent people capable of having fun with poetry and not just being holy about it. Miss Plat...
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Critical Essay by M. D. Uroff
In Plath's poems, the woman speaking is frequently talking to a man about their relationship. This relationship has almost always failed, and the cause of its fail...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Hardwick
In Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general pri...
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Critical Essay by Judith Kroll
The reading of [Plath's] work has been entangled in a fascination with her suicide and the broken marriage which preceded it, and such misreading is as widespread...
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Critical Essay by Sandra M. Gilbert
Being enclosed—in plaster, in a bell jar, a cellar or a waxhouse—and then being liberated from an enclosure by a maddened or suicidal or "hairy...
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Critical Essay by Caroline King Barnard
Sylvia Plath's early poetry is both technically and thematically significant, for scattered through the early poems are most of the elements which were l...
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Critical Essay by William Dowie
[While reading Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,] the reader feels as though he is looking at a Sylvia Plath pickled in a laboratory jar….
What we see is not...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
[The poems of The Colossus show that] Miss Plath has some of the excusable faults of youth: the attempt to blow up the tiniest personal experience into an event of vast, u...
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Critical Essay by Jon Rosenblatt
More successfully than any other recent American poet, Sylvia Plath dramatized those moments of crisis during which the self must choose between life and death. By usi...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
[Reading Plath's poetry, we] are continually outflanked by someone who knows what we'll approve and how we'll categorize, and is herself ready with t...
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Critical Essay by Marjorie Perloff
[What] Letters Home reveals, is that the various roles Plath assumed—Dutiful Daughter, Bright and Bouncy Smith Girl, Cambridge Intellectual, Adoring Wife and ...
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Critical Essay by Carole Ferrier
Plath was in many ways a victim of the fifties and its ideology of the family…. Plath, in common with women grappling then with the problems of developing femin...
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Critical Essay by Peter Davidson
[Plath's early poems] seemed to have no absolute necessity for being: they read like advanced exercises. She wrote a lot of prose as well, including a novel, bu...
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Critical Essay by Dan Jaffe
If, as Robert Frost pointed out, the purpose of any poem is to be different from every other poem, Ariel fails. We read the same poem over and over. The same techniques rec...
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Critical Essay by William F. Claire
[Sylvia Plath's] last poems hit the reader with all the passion and pathos of a mind simultaneously fused with love and hate. They are often glorious, mostly...
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In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted examines the development of Plath's poetry through analysis of major themes and imagery found in her description of landscapes, seascapes, and the nat...
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In the following essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation, and Plath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to r...
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In the following essay, Strangeways examines Plath's references to the Holocaust in light of her preoccupation with personal history and myth, female victimization, and the specter of nuclear w...
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In the following essay, Spendal discusses the significance of color symbolism, historical reference, and Plath's use of physical ailment as a metaphor for psychological injury in the poem �...
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In the following essay, Dobbs examines allusions to marriage and motherhood in Plath's poetry. According to Dobbs, the hostile and often violent imagery in such pieces reflects Plath's s...
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In the following essay, Uroff contrasts Plath's poetic voice with the confessional mode developed by American poet Robert Lowell. Uroff contends that Plath, unlike Lowell, incorporates abstract...
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In the following essay, Aird examines Plath's rapid creative development after the publication of The Colossus. Challenging "the oversimplified and rather sentimental theory" that...
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In the following essay, Annas offers analysis of depersonalization in Plath's poetry which, according to Annas, embodies Plath's response to oppressive modern society and her "dua...
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In the following essay, Broe discusses Plath's poetic vision during the writing of The Colossus.
Introduction
Before the advent of the posthumous volume Ariel in 1965, The Colossus poems were h...
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In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted traces instances of slang in Plath's poetry.
I
In a great number of Sylvia Plath's poems, the reader is invited to listen to a voice talking. U...
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In the following essay, Bundtzen examines “Burning the Letters” for its clues to the nature of Plath and Hughes's relationship.
Only they have nothing to say to anybody. I have se...
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In the following essay, Schultz finds allusions to mythological images of motherhood and womanhood in “Edge.”
As the last poem Sylvia Plath ever wrote, “Edge” is tempting t...
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In the following essay, Bawer contends that Plath's extreme popularity as a confessional poet in the 1960s can be attributed more to her reputation as an oppressed and victimized existentialist...
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In the following essay, Folsom examines the personal and professional significance of Plath's poem “Berck-Plage.”
Sylvia Plath's “Berck-Plage,” which contains...
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In the following essay, Materer analyzes the Freudian implications of occultism in Plath's poetry.
“O Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill,” are the concluding lines of Sylvia Plath&...
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In the following essay, Ramazani argues that Plath's poems expressing grief fit the criteria of modern elegy and that Plath expanded the genre by adding a tone of abiding anger.
“How the...
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In the following essay, Easthope discusses Plath's place in poetic tradition, particularly as it pertains to Romantic poetry.
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subje...
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In the following essay, Murphy attempts to locate sources for the imagery of violence and destruction in Plath's poetry.
Bodies melt, voices shriek; hooks pierce; human flesh is chopped, like m...
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In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted considers Plath's concerns with clairvoyance and occultism in her life and poetry.
Ted Hughes writes of Sylvia Plath: “The world of her poetry ...
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In the following essay, Manners examines similarities regarding images of paternity in the works of Plath and French feminist writer Hélène Cixous.
As early as 1982 (English translation,...
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[In the following essay, Horne details how Plath's published journals were manipulated by Hughes and his editor, thus providing a skewed rendering of Plath's life. Horne concludes that t...
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[Hamilton is an English poet, biographer, critic, and editor. His biographies include Robert Lowell: A Biography (1982) and In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988). In the following excerpt, he traces the ...
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[Atlas is an American poet, biographer, and critic. At the time this article was published, he was at work on a biography of Saul Bellow. In the following essay, he discusses the changing nature of bi...
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[Glendinning is an English biographer and novelist whose biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977) and Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981). In the following review of Ia...
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[Muske is an American educator, poet, novelist, and critic. In the following review of Linda Wagner-Martin's book Telling Women's Lives (1994), she rejects the author's thesis tha...
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[A nonfiction writer and biographer, Malcolm is well-known for her contributions to The New Yorker. In the following excerpt, first published in The New Yorker in slightly different form in August 199...
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[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Pettingell praises Malcolm's journalistic and self-conscious approach to biography.]
Janet Malcolm has created a literary niche for herself as a ch...
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[In the following review, James describes how Malcolm's investigation into Plath's life was fueled by her sympathy for Ted Hughes and how The Silent Woman presents a revisionist view of ...
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[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Kakutani outlines the longstanding libel case against Malcolm for her previous book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and its relevance to Malcolm&...
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[In this brief review of The Silent Woman, Cantwell stresses the elusive nature of biography and the futility of its quest to summarize a person's life.]
On Feb. 11, 1963, a young American name...
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[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Fels praises the intensity of Malcolm's writing and maintains that it is Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, who is the silent one.]
Janet Malcolm&...
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During the 1950's "Confessional" writing was a term not yet created. America had rarely dealt with ideas one felt so bluntly publicized to the world. It was not until Sylvia Plath began to share her...
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The pain the poet experiences during and prior to the creative process results in blood flood, which is the release and birth of words, the relentless stream of poetry. The poet bleeds the poems. They...
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A victim of her own surroundings, Plath was self obsessed in her need to understand her own torture. Her poetry, carefully crafted from past experiences, was her medium for venting and expressing her ...
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How can a person with a mental illness be so mad, but a the same be a poetic genius". A lot of us see a person with a mental illness as dumb, retarded, and a level different from where a 'normal human...
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Throughout the essay I will be explaining what form of poetry meter is being used in certain poems, how imagery is detailed and explain rhyming patterns that have been used as well as giving my own an...
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Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Otto and Aurelia Plath. Plath's father, Otto, immigrated to America from Germany when he was just sixteen years old...
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Sylvia Plath was a typical example of her generation, inpatient and greedy for life but this description has a bit different meaning. Plath indeed desired artistic fulfilment but she wanted to be an...
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Two Sisters of Persephone, written by Sylvia Plath depicts two very different lives of a renown Greek deity. Her ability to effectively portray completely contrasting environments through structure, t...
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Sylvia Plath's poetry takes a strong stance on the various aspects of power in the area of gender relations. She takes on a unique approach to criticise and reject patriarchal attitudes and values by...
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In society, women in the past and even in the present have suffered some form of oppression due to their female identity and the patriarchal world in which they live. Therefore, to reflect this many t...
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Plath, Sylvia
Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
