Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath: Dying to be Young

As Emily Dickinson once said, “People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.” Sylvia Plath foreshadowed many different things in her poetry that reflect the difficult experiences she endured in life. Her father’s death and her husband’s abandonment influenced her writing in several different of her poems. Plath’s suicidal tendencies and the deep depressions she suffered also led to some of her darkest and more cynical poems. Her work is known for the violent imagery credited to some of her most questionable times in life. Although Sylvia Plath experienced a hard life full of suicidal thoughts, these unbearable times ultimately led to her most famous poetry today.
Plath was born into
First, Sylvia Plath had a complicated relationship with her father and expressed her resentment towards his death in some of her poems. “They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I 'm through.” This final line to Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy”, shows her anguish and hatred towards her father even after his long-ago death. One can blatantly see all throughout this poem that Plath is expressing intense emotions towards her father’s life and death but finally comes to terms with him in the end. She was also illustrating her feelings of resentment towards her husband with her harsh and vivid words. (“Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’” 1). The poem “Daddy” exemplifies the pain that was stored and built up in Sylvia’s childhood. When she first heard of her father’s death, she proclaimed, “I will never speak to God again”. Sylvia believed her father could have prevented his death but instead stood by and did nothing (Wagner-Martin 67). In another poem, “Electra on Azalea Path” she describes her first visit to her father’s grave and the affect it had on her own life in a poetic manner. “I brought my love to bear, and then you died. / It was the gangrene ate you to the bone / My mother said: you died like any man. / How shall I age into that state of mind?” These four lines are from the end of Plath’s poem “Electra on
“Plath’s forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless” (Wagner-Martin, 2). The many difficult things she underwent changed her poems and made her famous. Her poetry often reflects the painful times she experienced; such as, her father’s death at a young age, her husband leaving her with two infants, and her own battles with depression. Also, the issues in Plath’s life gave her grounds for writing very good, deep, and angry poems that will be remembered forever. The depressing factors added to the meanings of her poems and the underlying tone in them. Because of Plath’s not-so-perfect family and home life, it made for very well-written poetry. Towards the final days of her life, Plath wrote “Twelve final poems shortly before her death that defined a nihilistic metaphysic from which death provided the only escape” (Stevenson 2). As one can see, Sylvia Plath wrote poems to escape from her problematic life and expressed most of her feelings through her dark poems. Due to her sad experiences, she wrote poems that reflected her suicidal tendencies and, eventually, became