Ariel Sylvia Plath

Life and death, beginnings and endings. The death of one person: the ending of two lives, or the beginning of both? Sylvia Plath, tumbling through madness toward suicide, created a collection of poems titled Ariel, and used the theme poem to...

Sylvia Plath composed her most famous - and infamous - poem "Daddy" at a time in her life when she must certainly have been contemplating suicide, or at the very least was in the grip of a devastating depression. At this point Plath, having been...

Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath are two contemporary poets from very different family backgrounds. Heaney grew up rooted in rural Ireland with a close-knit large family, and Plath grew up in a dislocated family with her mother and brother. Her...

Sigmund Freud, as a nineteenth century neurologist, intricately studied the workings of the human mind, leading him to develop a controversial theory termed psychoanalysis. He differentiated between that which we knowingly do and think, and what...

Russian Formalism was a school of literary thought which emerged in Russia during the 1910’s. Members of this movement attempted to study literary language and literature according to scientific methods, and Peter Brooks states that they focussed...

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...

I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath's heart beat, and she translated it the best way she knew how. To a woman who was self-aware to an uncommon degree, what else could the sound be but a relentless reminder of her own existence? Many have pointed to...

Arguably one of Plath’s more joyous poems, You’re can be considered a celebration of a child growing inside a mother’s womb. Particularly noteworthy is its affirming outlook on life, albeit that of Plath’s new child rather than her own existence....