Sylvia Plath: Her Release

11 Pages 2803 Words

Sylvia Plath: Her Release

An American poet, Sylvia Plath was a writer with a life that generated a lot of interest. The interest that followed Plath was a result of her highly personal writings that eventually lead into her suicide. Her works closely reflect her life, and by understanding the events in Plath’s life her poetry becomes clearer to the reader. Sylvia Plath’s complex relationship with her father is revealed through imagery used in her writings including the poem "Daddy.” Plath developed as a writer with an individual style. She used diction in her writings, which give the reader a very distinct understanding of her as an individual. Her poems capture impressions of particular moments, scenes or moods, and she focuses on topics such as her father, death, pain and the self. Sylvia Plath’s poems are known to be sorrowful. “Through bold metaphors and stark, often violent and unsettling imagery, Plath’s works evoke some of the mythic qualities of nature and human experience. Her vivid, intense poem explores such topics as personal identity, individual suffering and oppression, and the inevitability of death” (Draper 2733). Sylvia did not show her derangement in her poems often, but when she did she tried to work it out between reason and love. Sylvia showed a lot of pain and sorrow through her poems. She would write about two opposites like madness and saneness, despair and glory, life and death, acceptance and rejection, love and hate. Sylvia’s poems have an inspiration of her father. As a child Plath sees her father as a god; “A bag full of God.” “Not God but a swastika,” shows her transitioning him from a Godly figure into a Natzi. She refers to him as “Panzer man” and also states, “With your Luftwaffe.” “The father’s precipitous fall from a deity to evil incarnate sets up the poems denouement. Not only does she call him a “Natzi,” but a “brute,” “fascist,” “devil,”...