A look into Sylvia Plath\'s Poetry: A Personal Approach

A discourse on Sylvia Plath's Poetry: A Personal Account:- Sylvia Plath, one of the most controversial poets of the 20 th Century has created much furore in the literary world. Her poems have been deeply autobiographical, and hence have had a touch of the dark melancholy she lived through. Her death, a much-often poeticised one, was a suicide by inhalation of oven gas. The picture, available easily on the internet, is a deeply disturbing one, much like Plath's poetry, as many scholars would agree. Ted Hughes, Plath's Husband (with whom her relations weren't very happy), describes Plath's poetry as " Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and Holymen. " Plath's poetry forms the background of deeply disturbing imageries, as will be a part of the course of this essay, but this would primarily look at Plath's poetry through the eyes of an observer standing on the middle ground, where the problematization is bipolar. A major part of our understanding of Plath comes from her holocaust poetry, where she imagines herself to be a part of the holocaust. This is deeply problematic in the fact that she never had the required lived experience to write about the holocaust, and we can never separate the distortion that her psychosis influenced in her interpretation of the holocaust. Looking into her arguably most popular Holocaust poem, Daddy,we find not only a Nazi father, but the troublesome relationship between a Nazi father and his daughter, penned down in Plath's technical confessional style. Lady Lazarus,another masterpiece of Plath, talks of death, and at times, the reader is duped into believing the poetic beauty of death. The interpretations of these two poems have been much often discussed by scholars and stalwarts, so this piece would not attempt to delve into that. Rather, it would try to look at other pieces and try to comment on what the general style of Plath's writing has been, and where can it be problematized for further continuation of the dialog.