Research Paper On Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was one of the most self-motivated and well-regarded poets of the 20th century. She was an American poet, novelist, and short story write. Plath was born in Boston and studied at the University of Cambridge before receiving approval as a poet and writer. By the time, she took her life at the age of 30, Plath was already known in the literary community. In the following years, her work attracted the attention of many readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. Plath uses her poems to explore her own mental suffering, her troubled marriage to poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and the vision she has of herself. Plath utilises personification, and complex imagery to express her major themes concerning the unfair oppression of women, nature’s
indifference to human suffering and the death as an escape of cruelty.
Paragraph 1:
Plath’s personification of nature is mainly seen in her poem Suicide of Egg rock and Black rock.
Plath uses personification in her poetry in order to allow her to discuss the fragility of the human condition and to exaggerate how the human life is very fragile. She wrote “black rock” as she desires back talk from the mute sky, Plath doesn’t believe in God explaining why she says, “it’d be nice”, Plath also refers to how she wishes she knew the intelligence behind nature. Black rock is mainly written in an Atheist world view, she speaks about the aspects of nature being God like because it last’s so long, where as we as humans live for a limited amount of time while nature lives on. She writes about this to draw attention to the fact that it’s the opposite “world is cruel etc.”. “Ripped and pulsed in the glassy updraught,” this also backs up what she thinks of the world as she talks about how the sun was baring down on the dead man’s body giving him no privacy and any sympathy making nature again seem violent using the sun. Plath uses personification to to convey the idea that nature is unsympathetic o the human
suffering.
Paragraph 2:
In the poem, Daddy Plath used a lot of historically charged words mainly the Holler cost which she used to refer to her own personal journey. The use of historically charged words had a lot of imagery as it was symbolic to her life. In many instances, nature was used to personify her. Plath also used history in a similar way “to explain herself,” she writes about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. In her poem Daddy, a lot of reference to the Nazi were used. Plath uses negative connotations to create a figurative image of her father, using lots of different metaphors to describe her relationship with him and to evoke an image of a brutal, wicked man. “You do not do, you do not do, any more, black shoe,” he is like a black shoe that she’s had to live in; like a god, like a Nazi, like a swastika and like a vampire. Plath, was faced with her father as a evil Nazi, that takes the path of a Jew and a victim. But yet in this poem Plath metaphorically, ends up getting a revenge saying to have killed both her father and her husband the man she made as a model of her father. The poem Daddy shows her struggle as on oppressed woman to declare that, no matter how terrible they were to her and how much they remain n her mind, she is finally through with them.