The Literary Criticism of

Sylvia Plath

Jeff King

Period 5

English

6-12-01

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 and died in 1963. In 1950 she received a scholarship to attend Smith College. (Exploring Poetry) There she studied enormously to achieve her goals. But in 1953 she hid herself in her basement of her home and attempted suicide. She was not successful and was placed in a hospital for treatment. Plath was able to return to college in 1954 and graduated in 1955. In 1959 Plath returned to England and had two children. Plath and her husband could not work things out and were divorced and she moved to London. The failure of her marriage caused her severe depression and she took her own life on February 11, 1963.

In the poem Ariel many of Path's anger is spread throughout the poem.

"The poetry of Sylvia Plath' Ariel is a poetry of surrender, surrender to an imagination that destroys life instead of enhancing it. Nowhere in our literature has a finely wrought art proven so subversive as hers, so utterly at adds with those designs, those structures within which we customarily enclose ourselves to hold experience off at a distance. Emerging from encounter with her poems, as from the murky, subterranean depths of a well, one feels not so much emotionally raped as simply breathless with weariness and confusion (P.C. Vol. 1. 383).

The reader is left in shock after reading Sylvia Plath's poetry. There are no words to describe the feelings after reading this poem. "A Poem written out of extreme conditions (Howe). "Abandoned the sense of audience" (Howe). Plath has jumped into her own world where she is so lost that she can not use the right words to describe what she is feeling. This poem was written only days before her death and there are true signs of this. One critic calls it "A death rattle of a sick girl" (Malcolm CLC Vol. 1. 269-270). "People surrender to death and destroys life" (CLC Vol 1. 383). Plath did not have to strength to withstand the pain she was feeling. "The theme of this poem is rebirth and to be reborn you need to die" (CLC Vol. 1. 410-411). Plath shows in this poem how she feels if she kills herself and wants to start all over again. She is angry with herself and takes the pain.

"In these poems [in Ariel], written in the last months of her life and often rushed out the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself and becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly, and subtly created-hardly a person at all, or a woman certainly not another "poetess," but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines. This character is feminine, rather then female, though almost everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head" (PC Vol. 1. 379-380).

When Plath is in her worst of pain she will write her best work. She had so few days left in her life when she was in pain and depression that she was getting everything off of her mind that she could possible could. The words she came up with did not make sense to the average reader and made Plath's work misunderstood too many.

"Ariel points an implicit accusatory finger at the critical language we habitually employ to describe the poetry we love. Indeed it is doubtful that one ought to even to assay an explanation of his strange love of these poems, with their repellant details and anguished evocation of insufficiency and dread. Perhaps one can be content to merely to locate the major sources of our fascination, wherever possible refusing to dilute the tensions which constitute the very fiber of the poetry." (PC Vol. 1. 384)

This critic believes that Plaths writing is so wrong that should not even bother trying to depict what she is trying to say. Some have the patience for Plath's poems but other do not. This is why Plath is so misunderstood.