Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)
1. American Confessional Poet.
2. Confessional Poetry is a style of poetry
that is personal, often making use of a first-
person narrator. It is a branch of
Postmodernism that emerged in the US in
the 1950s and 1960s. It was a reaction
against T.S. Eliot’s “Theory of
impersonality”.
3. Confessional Poets include Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, and W. D.
Snodgrass.
5. Characteristics of Confessional Poetry
i) Engagement with personal experience
(autobiographical elements)
ii) Personal trauma
iii) Mental illness, sexuality, and suicide
iv) Individuality
v) Distance oneself from the horrifying
social realities
6. Famous Collections:
i) The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
ii) Ariel (1965)
iii) The Bell Jar (1963): semi-
autobiographical novel
7. Awards:
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982 for The
Collected Poems (1981).
Daddy
1. Written: October 12, 1962, four months
before her death by suicide and one month
after her separation from Ted Hughes.
2. Published: Published posthumously in
Ariel (1965) alongside "Tulips” and "Lady
Lazarus."
3. Daddy, Lady Lazarus and Tulips are
called ‘October Poems’.
4. Biographical Notes:
i) Plath's complex relationship with her
father, Otto Plath (1885 – 1940). He was a
German American writer, academic, and
biologist. He died of high diabetes when
Plath was only 8 years old.
ii) Her complex relationship with Ted
Hughes from 1956 to 1962. In July 1962,
Plath discovered Hughes had been having
an affair with Assia Wevill; in September,
Plath and Hughes separated.
iii) Sylvia Plath attempted suicide three
times. Her thirtieth birthday marks her third
time to attempt death. Her first attempt was
at 10.
5. Daddy Metaphor
i) Oppression, ii) Male-dominance, iii) War
and Violence, iv) Inhuman Agents, v) Hitler
and Nazi government (1933 – 1945), vi)
Fascism, vii) Holocaust (Mass Killings of
the Jews), and viii) Oedipus-Complex.
6. Critic George Steiner referred to "Daddy"
as "the Guernica of modern poetry".
Guernica is a 1937 anti-war oil painting by
Pablo Picasso.
7. Plath’s mother was a Jew. Here Plath is
the representative of the Jews, oppressed
and his father symbolizes Hitler or Nazi or
Patriarchy.
