Poems by Sylvia Plath

As Ellmann and O'Clair write, Plath is a member of that "tradition in our culture [which believes] that the writing of poetry is a dangerous vocation, that great wits are, in fact, to madness near allied, and that poets sometimes court emotional disaster, discovering within themselves areas of pain, confusion, and heartbreak which they transform into works of art, occasions for their readers for fear, trembling, and compassion" (1416).

These are the subjects of Plath's poems - madness (or an emotional awareness and intensity similar to madness), suicide, death, and pain. Indeed, her image-ridden poetry tries to transform these emotions and subjects into works of art.

In the first poem, "Lady Lazarus," Plath presents to us her rage at the reaction of others to her failed suicide attempts. In fact, her poems may be indeed about rage more than anything else, but that rage is expressed with such cleverness, such apparent objectivity, such control and discipline in terms of her writing and narrative, that we have the feeling almost that she is writing about somebody else, about an idea of suicide and return rather than about her own life.

The poem portrays her as both victim and perpetrator, but she seems to be emphasizing the victim aspect of the equation. She portrays herself as a Jew in the hands of Nazis, as if

. . .
lath portrays the other human beings around her as insensitive clods with "eyes/ Dulled to a halt under bowlers" (1422). She is the only one who knows the truth of life, of reality, and yet her knowledge is so intense that it has turned her into a walking time bomb which can go off at any time, usually, or so she believes, only hurting herself. Death and beauty blend into one terrifying entity which marks her as both a blessed and a cursed being. "Daddy" makes clear to us that the real and symbolic person most responsible for her terror and her anguished longing is her father. Again, we find numerous German and Nazi references, but the imagery has more to do with emotional matters than anything else. Plath describes a love-hate relationship with her father, emphasizing his coldness, his inability to communicate with her or to be open to her feelings, her needs. She describes herself as being terrified of him, terrified even of expressing herself to him, and the Nazi images abound: "I never could talk to you./ The tongue stuck in my jaw./ It stuck in a barb wire snare-./ Ich, ich, ich, ich,/ I could hardly speak./ I thought every German was you./And the language obscene/An engine, an engine/ Chuffing me off like a Jew./
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1647
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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