Summary

Confessional term was used to describe the kind of poetry that Lowell wrote in Life Studies.

“Confessionalism” is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States in 1950s. It is a kind of

poetry that that focus on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal

trauma often set in relation to broader social themes. Confessionalism entered with Lowell and it

was followed by various great poets of twentieth century like Anne Sexton, Andriene Rich, Sylvia

Plath and many others. Plath who is also a confessional poet fallowed Lowell’s mode of

expression.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) enriched the modern literature by her remarkable contribution. As a poet,

academician and intellectual she invested feminism with a vigorous force and new dimensions.

Her poetic oeuvre extends up to several volumes of poetry, shorts stories and semi-

autobiographical novel Bell Jar that prestige awards like Pulitzer Prize, Glascock prize and

Fulbright scholarship. Her writings are marked by thematic reliance and individualism. In an

effective manner Plath has vitalized literature.

The study of Sylvia Plath’s poetry highlights her themes and techniques and reveals her growth

and development as a poet. She expresses her inner world in her poetry. Plath is a major American

poet who extends the frontiers of poetry with her forays into areas of human consciousness rarely

explored by creative writers. Her talent got famous both in America and England. Plath’s poetic

strategies give evidence of a carefully crafted prosody. The pictures that Plath created through her

poetry are terrifying. Her horror of mind could clearly be seen in her poetry. Her poetry has a

unique characteristic, her poems create a cosmos a poetic universe replete with symbolic

properties, a universe that encompasses similar landscapes seascapes and personae who are

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isolated and often battered and traumatized. Sylvia Plath was the writer for whom literature and

personal life were single unit.

In Sylvia Plath’s poetry there is a sense of menace that is due to her obsessions in her real life.

Plath was a neurotic obsessive personality but her position in the world of art was not comparable.

By reading her biography her texts could easily be understood. Sylvia Plath’s life was full with

suffering and deprivation and conflict undoubtly provided the impulse, the motivation to dwell on

and emphasize specific themes in her poetry

Plath used death and rebirth as major themes in her poetry. Death is a recurrent theme in Plath’s

poetry it is because of early death of her father. The father death left the daughter with powerful

feeling of defeat, remorse, grief and resentment. The absence of father effected Plath’s life a lot

and it is clearly visible in her poetry. Plath passed the periods of depression and it resulted in

continuous attempts of suicidal attempts at various intervals of life. She broke down with the

unfulfilment of her dream of being a successful writer. She once took an overdose of sleeping pills

to perish her miseries but fortunately she was saved. Her continuous reference to death and rebirth

through various images shows her wish to die and rise again in a better way. In her poetry she has

used a lot of images to represent death. Plath thought that death is the best way to meet with her

father, for whose love she lacked from her childhood she wanted to reunite with her dead father

and death was the only mean to achieve this goal. So, death for Plath is just way out to rebirth that

reunites her with her father. Plath was totally unsatisfied with her life, for her life was meaningless

and the best way she gives meaning to her life is through dying and rebirth. Commenting on the

poem “Lady Lazarus”, which contain theme of death and rebirth, John Rosenblatt suggests:

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“The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in “Lady Lazarus” has been deliberately

chosen by the speaker. She enacts her death repeatedly in order to cleanse herself of the “million

filaments” of guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the womb like state of

being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus, or of being rocked “shut as a seashell,” she

expects to emerge reborn in a new reform” 1

Plath justifies her suicide attempts that they are response of her call: “I guess you could say I have

a call”. Perhaps this call could be her downright determination to end her life of suffering and

depression, and to reborn into a better life. Judith Kroll links Plath’s personal events to her

treatment of the image of rebirth:

“To see autobiographical details only as such is to regard Plath’s vision of suffering and

death as morbid, but to appreciate the deeper significance of her poetry to to understand

her fascination with death as connected with and transformed into a broader concerned

with the themes of rebirth and transcendence.”2

After analyzing her poems it is obvious that she realizes for better resurrection it demand her death

as a first step. It resulted in her continuous suicide attempts. She was preoccupied with the idea of

death.

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Plath always felt a victim in the male dominated society. Her poetry is a well example of her

feelings of victimization, and raised her voice against the brutalities of the men who were present

in her life including her father and her husband.

The question of identity is another major theme that could be found in Plath’s poetry. In her poems

the personas discard their old unwanted identity and adopt a new, more fulfilling one. Sylvia Plath

thinks in and organizes her in terms of polarities. The antithetical concepts of life and death are

her twin themes that occur side by side.

Plath’s poetry could not be treated as only autobiographical, subjective .and self-centered. They

show an awareness of the social and political climate of the time. She played a well role of mother,

wife and daughter while being very much conscious that she was a brilliant, intelligent woman.

She was profoundly affected by the conflicting ideologies of domesticity and achievement. The

double standard of American society resulted in Sylvia Plath’s envy and hatred of men. The fearful

and contradictory nature of American culture of the 1950’s influenced her poetry and at the same

time aroused anxiety in Plath’s own life.

In Plath’s poems like ‘Daddy’ and ‘lady Lazarus’ there are expressions of the woman’s struggle

for equality and power in a social order that is male dominated, exploited, looked upon as subjects

and private possessions. In her poems there is are images of women being imprisoned and tortured

as well as those who strive for identity of their own. Plath in most of her poems discards the

dominant patriarchal agenda of male dominant society. The writer shows her anger towards men

in the poems like ‘The Jailer’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘The Applicant’ and ‘the couriers’. Many critics have

misunderstood and misinterpreted Plath’s poetry. The charge of solipsism has been levelled against

Plath’s poetry by Joyce Carol Oates. “Solipsism” is defined as the theory that the “self is all that

exists or can be known,”3. This type of misunderstanding exists in the poems like “The Applicant”.

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“Three Woman “and “Purdah”, since they portray the agonizing entrapment of the different

personas by the powerful social order of the times in which they live. Plath’s use of Holocaust has

also been questioned. Commenting on the Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery in the poem “Daddy”

Irving Howe opines that her comparisons are “utterly disappropriate”.Plath’s poetry dovetails both

the private and public world. Due to tis fusion she was able to produce texts that function as a

mirror of the times in which she lived.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is confessional as she uses autobiographical material as a raw material. There

are a lot of poems in which she showed revolt against a fictitious father-daughter persona. Her

poetry establishes an ambivalent attitude towards nationality. Plath’s poetry promotes a cultural

hybridization. In her poem ‘Crossing the Water’ it is never made clear which water is crossed.

Plath’s poetry has an environmental effect in which she lived. Her powerful poem ‘Elm’

foregrounds her position as environmentalist. Her poetry also depict the repercussion of nuclear

bombs which highlights her environmental concerns. The Hiroshima incident makes the poet to

think so, it is obvious that the social elements reflect in Plath’s poetry. Plath’s later works are filled

with images that are linked together by free association of ideas. These images create a powerful

effect on the psyche of the reader. The world of Plath’s poetry is a rich that hold the reader

enthralled. There are moving pictures of Plath’s poetic landscape in her poetry. Color symbolism

is employed in an effective manner in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. The black color in her poems is

associated with her father and husband that is male power and authority. This could the most

remarkable aspect of Plath is that loud is also used in the poems like ‘Daddy’, ‘Man in Black’ and

‘Crossing the Water’ to represent death. This ambiguous use of mirrors shows her state of mind.

A remarkable aspect of Sylvia Plath’s is to create beauty out of personal suffering and describe it

vividly and with fascination and to employ very appropriate images for it. Many of the Plath’s

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poems like ‘Tulips’, ‘Cut’, ‘Fever’ etc. deal with Plath’s sickness and disease, suffering but what

is remarkable about her poetic sensibility is that instead of being depressed and saddened by

disease and sufferings Plath added vigor and energy to perceive things at a deeper level. The

experience of sufferings and disease heightened her imaginative sensibilities. Suffering and

disease in her poetry provides to the poet an almost visionary desire and mystical experience. Plath

created poetry out of sensation.

Sylvia Plath considered writing a way of life, an expression of being alive , for her writing was an

expression of her personality and it was also a preservation of her sanity. Her creativity is directly

related to her personal experience. There is a close relationship between her life and art. Her

writing is a reflection of her mind. In Plath’s poetry there was a conflict between social

acceptability and writing, between creativity and academic success. In her writing the frustrations

of her life are clearly visible. She wrote only to escape from the frustrations of her life. Many of

Plath’s poems when read in collaboration with her biographical information, betray the emotional

concerns experienced by her at the time of their composition. Her poems are influenced by the

disturbing experiences and intense pressures of her life, a troubled and uncertain marriage and a

growing sense of financial and personal vulnerability in her roles as a mother and a wife. There is

a bitterness, anger and hatred towards the male society.

Plath employed perfect techniques of expression in her poetry. She used verbal manipulation of

external events and objects. She was aware of the power of words and she used them effectively

in her poetry. Mastery over words and their use in her poetry is the successful step to gain control

over experience. This sort of experience made her able to use simile , metaphor alliteration and the

entire rage of rhyme scheme in her poetry. In her poetry diction is ornate and the content is

manipulated.

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About Sylvia Plath’s poetry we can say the poetry is sensation recollected in tranquility. She draws

on sensation which are poignant in their effect and binds images around them. Such type of

technique is found in ‘Tulips’, ‘Cut’, ‘Fever’, ‘Ariel’ and ‘Years’. It is found that the range of

sensation in her poetry is not confined merely to physical level. It embraces the physical and mental

level. One more remarkable aspect of Sylvia Plath’s poetic technique is her use of dramatic

personae for objectifying her own personal feelings which have confessional urgency.

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 REFERENCES

1. Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvai Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. North Carolina: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1980, p.109.

2. Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper

and Row,1976.

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