Sylvia Plath
Ryan Biery, Billy Foshay
and Meghan Curtin
Biographical (1932-1963)
• Frequent financial troubles
• Father died
• Feminist through college
• Depression
• Married, lost focus
• Attempted suicide
• Bell jar
• Final suicide
“Sylvia Plath's suicide, which some critics read as her last, inevitable poem, has led most critics to assume a greater degree of
fulfillment and completion in her work than it can justly claim…”
Themes
• Death
• Violence
• Depression
• Suicide
• Isolation
• Pessimism
• Self-Destruction
“…many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical
instrument, out of arctic ice…”
Motifs
• Darkness
• Blood (“Cut”)
• God
• Glory
• Outdoor Setting
• Colors (black, red, white)
“The passive, paralyzed, continually surfacing and fading consciousness of Sylvia Plath in her poems is disturbing to us because
it seems to summon forth, to articulate with deadly accuracy….”
Motivation
• Separation anxiety
• Genetic depression
• Strong sense of feminism
• Lack of fame
• Father’s death
• Attempted suicide
“Sylvia Plath has made beautiful poetry out of the paranoia sometimes expressed by a certain kind of emotionally
disturbed person, who imagines that any relationship with anyone will overwhelm him, engulf and destroy his soul. ”
Literary Devices
• Allusion (ex. Nazis)
• Slant rhyme
• End rhyme
• Obsessive Repetition
• Motifs
• Imagery
“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…”
“Cinderella”
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.
“Cut”
What a thrill --My thumb instead of an
onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your
scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.
A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man --The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and
when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump --Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
“The Life”
Touch it: it won't shrink like an
eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear
as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year --Palm-spear and lily distinct as
flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a
tapestry.
Flick the glass with your
fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime
in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up
or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as
cork,
Every one of them permanently
busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow
in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like
paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled
and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This
family
Of valentine faces might please a
collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more
frank.
The light falls without letup,
blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in
a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet
of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a
sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a
foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea,
flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions
to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of
departure.
Age and terror, like nurses,
attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of
the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
Criticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Beautiful…”
“Saintly…”
“[Unnecessarily] heavy verbs…”
“Intensified…”
“Zany, accurate and unexpected…”
“Sylvia Plath's suicide, which some critics
read as her last, inevitable poem…”
“…eccentric imagination”
“Strange..”
“Startling expressions”
“Redemption”
We Agree...
• “Saintly…”
• “Zany, accurate and unexpected…”
• “Intensified…”
• “…eccentric imagination”
• “Strange..”
• “Redemption”
We Disagree…
• “Beautiful…”
• “[Unnecessarily] heavy verbs…”
• “Accurate”
• “Startling expressions”
“
There is no human glory, no
salvation except death.
“
Works Cited
American poets, 1880-1945, first series. Detroit, Mich: Gale Research Co., 1986.
Giles, James, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 152. The Gale Group, 1995.
Mendelson, Riley, ed. Contemporary Literary Critisism. Vol. 5. Gale Research Company.
"The Poetry of Sylvia Plath." Stanford University. 01 Apr. 2009
<http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html>.
Steinberg, Peter K. Sylvia Plath. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004.
"Sylvia Plath." 01 Apr. 2009
<http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=wmmhs_ca&srchtp=athr&ca
=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13031637&n=10&docNum=H1000078643&ST=sylvia+plath&bC
onts=16047>.
"Sylvia Plath." 01 Apr. 2009
<http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=wmmhs_ca&srchtp=athr&ca
=1&c=4&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13031637&n=10&docNum=H1200000441&ST=sylvia+plath&bC
onts=16047>.