Sylvia Plath's poem “Daddy”

Introduction

Sylvia Plath made one of the most riveting poetic oeuvres in English. Her poems disclose a viewpoint and a dialect use that are utterly unique. Yet they are also associated to the Renaissance, loving, modernist and Cold War rhetorics she inherited and to the postmodernism that her work assisted to generate through both affirmative and contradictory example. Plath's poems seethe with wrath, wish, yearn and disappointment.

Discussion

Such poems as 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' reflect what Plath called 'an intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience' (PS, p. 167-8), revealing interiority not as a realm of spiritual privilege ...