SOURCE: "Sylvia Plath's Psychic Landscapes," in English Studies, Vol. 71, No. 6, December, 1990, pp. 509-22.

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 natural world.

Following the lead of Ted Hughes, critics today tend to read Sylvia Plath's poetry as a unity. Individual poems are best read in the context of the whole oeuvre: motifs, themes and images link poems together and these linkages illuminate their meaning and heighten their power. It is certainly easy to see that through almost obsessive repetition some elements put their unforgettable mark on the poetry: themes such as the contradictory desires for life and death and the quests for selfhood and truth; images like those of color, with red, black and white dominating the palette; and symbols of haunting ambiguity, for example, the moon and...