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...

Regardless of what role Sylvia Plath was playing at any given time--student, poet, teacher, wife--her feverish perfectionism was a constant factor. During her tumultuous years at Smith College, her concern over the defects she perceived in her...

Although raised near the ocean and fascinated by the power of nature, Sylvia Plath spent most of her life in the suburbs and the city. In July 1960, however, she and Ted Hughes went camping for a week in Rock Lake, Canada. Not only was she with...

Throughout their poems, authors Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte convey their ideas regarding the despair they have felt throughout their lives, and in particular the concept that ‘thing fall apart’. Through a range of engaging...

"As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world" - Richard Louv

Plath and Hughes seem to have different relationships with nature; in The Long Tunnel Ceiling Hughes, Hughes seems to gain a...

The theme of violence is commonly identified within both Plath's and Hughes’ poetry; however, the way in which it is incorporated by the two very different poets contrasts one another, from the use of techniques, the different tones throughout –...

Poetry is a meaningful expression of art through the illustration of fascinating words and their hidden implication used to reflect the sense of life. Sylvia Plath as well as Charlotte Gilman were both prolific female poets who made a mark in the...

After the post-humous publication of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the poet exploded into the scene of second wave feminism, widely regarded as a victim of her mental illness and the men in her life. While the tragedy of Plath’s life is inseparable from...

The Holocaust is one of the most devastating and incomprehensible events in human memory. The systematic killing of millions of civilians and the attempted erasure of their culture defies logic, and exists outside the realm of everyday...

Sylvia Plath is known for being a prominent female poet of the 20th century whose work often focused on feminine aspects of life such as motherhood, as well as the challenges of being an educated, aspiring female author in the patriarchal 1960s in...

On the surface, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich seem like the most dissimilar of contemporary poets: Rich identified as Jewish, lesbian, and a feminist, while Plath considered herself religiously apathetic and although some scholars interpret the...

In the two poems, "Spelling" by Margaret Atwood and "Words" by Sylvia Plath, words are described in terms of power: the power to create, to penetrate, to move, and to destroy. Both poets invoke images of words as connected to time and forces of...

Kathryn Stockett’s novel, ‘The Help’, and Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Morning Song’ can be closely linked together through gender constructs, especially those enforced upon women. With corresponding themes of motherhood, female identity and a patriarchal...

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” takes the reader through a journey from birth to adulthood in the life of the subject. Incorporating several strategies including imagery, sound and rhyme schemes, Sylvia Plath brings the reader through a journey as the...

Inspired by the 1927 Giorgio De Chirico painting of the same name, Sylvia Plath’s 1956 poem, Conversation Among The Ruins, is an ekphrastic sonnet structured as a story about author’s own failed relationship. The original painting, done in the...

Plath often looks at the cycle of life from birth through to death: as death is a cycle, it may not be the end, but rather, a new beginning. In “Edge” one must take a journey with death showing that if one seizes life, then one can seize death and...

The first thing that springs in my mind while reading Sylvia Plath's Sheep in Fog is the complex and strange relation of its title to the content of the poem where the speaker-traveler witnesses a herd of sheep in a foggy winter, as mentioned by...

The works of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath are often presented in stark, binary contrast to each other – Bishop as a generally reserved, often cryptic observer of the natural world and Plath as a brutally expressive, easily legible vessel of...

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...