The female or female-identifying writer must often acknowledge motherhood in her writing, as men often project and expect women to act like their mothers even in sexual relationships. No matter what wave of feminism, motherhood is still seen as...

Every true artist develops a style, with the greatest managing to produce styles different than their contemporaries. Different styles set artists apart so that people they have not met nor ever will can observe the person’s art and recognize the...

In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, gets accepted to a summer internship at a prominent magazine in New York City. There, she meets Doreen, her co-worker. Esther is different from her. Doreen goes against the...

In both The Bell Jar and Fight Club use the most literal symbols of cleansing and renewal – a bath and soap respectively. Once these books use these literal symbols, the irony sets in. The cleansing remains but the symbolic meaning of the...

Babies: cute pink hats and shoes that seem unimaginably small and that new baby smell that signifies the beginning of a lifelong journey of parenthood and family. The birth of a new child can be the happiest occasion in a person’s life; however,...

In the novels The House on Mango Street and The Bell Jar, the two authors, Sandra Cisneros and Sylvia Plath show very contrasting motherly figures. Both novels are telling the general story of the respective authors through pseudonyms, Esperanza...

Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant,” is a 40-line poem first published in The London Magazine in 1963, then later republished posthumously in Plath’s second poetry collection, Ariel, in 1965. Her poem describes an unknown, presumably eligible male who...

Sylvia Plath’s use of “psychic landscapes”, as she describes it, has proven to be quite effective in highlighting key themes in her various poems. It serves as an outlet for expressing intense feelings that are otherwise impossible to convey...

Due to the obligatory nature of motherhood, Plath exposes the co-dependent relationship between mother and child, unveiling the nuances of love, dependency and fear endured by women. Sylvia Plath's poetry collection "Ariel" uncovers the subtle yet...

Any true representation of horror, the sickening realization of the hideous or unbelievably ghastly, seems something of an impossibility. How can one speak the unspeakable? How can unimaginable terror and revulsion ever be recreated? Yet writers...

The primary concern of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” is how the female speaker views her relationship with men; the emotions associated with her views of sex are equated to death, and the desire for her to die. This metaphor of death, used...

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is considered by some to be one of the best examples of confessional poetry ever published. In the poem, Plath compares the horrors of Nazism to the horrors of her own life, all of which are centered on the death of her...

In her 1960 poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” American-born Sylvia Plath relays the feeling that a miracle has alighted in the form of a black rook. The bird’s beauty takes her off guard in a preternatural way on an otherwise dreary day, and she...

In her poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath uses violent, unnerving, and controversial imagery to illustrate her tumultuous relationship with her father both before and after his death in 1940. Her work, and this poem in particular, is often distinguished...

In her poem “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath speaks to her deceased father, explaining to him how his death caused her pain throughout her life and why she needs to “Kill” him. Sylvia Plath's father died when she was very young. In her poem she shows that...

1963 was a particularly important year for American Confessional Poetry Movement for one of its chief proponents, Sylvia Plath famously committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, sticking her head inside the oven and leaving behind a...

Considered to be blueprint for the mechanics of tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics revolves around the assumption that great works of tragedy must include a generous number of mimetic elements, or elements which readily imitate human life. In addition,...

Sylvia Plath’s Reinvented Lazarus

“The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain,...

Sylvia Plath’s "Mirror" explores the impact of time on individuals, specifically within the realities of aging and losing beauty; here, Plath speaks from an implied autobiographical perspective. As readers, we know that much of Plath’s oeuvre of...

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads,William Wordsworth describes good poetry as being “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (6). The style of confessional poetry seems especially fitting to this description; to think that confessional...

This essay will look at both the polarity and unity within the mental suffering of characters and voices from Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire (‘Streetcar’) and Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, focusing specifically on the extent to...

Within the poetry of Hughes and Plath, the theme of human relationships is written of in varying and diverse manners. Plath’s work details relationships, such as the parent-child relationship, using powerful and intricate imagery, while Hughes...

Throughout an examination of Plath’s poetry, a reader will witness prominent themes of inadequacy and mental anguish. The poet’s lack of self-belief is primarily evident in ‘Mirror’, as the poet struggles to overcome her insecurities. Furthermore,...

With the twentieth century now receded, students and scholars will return time and again to contributors of this century’s literary canon. In the realm of poetry, there are several candidates to consider, but one forceful contender for the list of...