Life, love and death in the poetry of Sylvia Plath

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 9,0, University of Jaén, course: 3º, language: English, abstract: As Carmelo Medina Casado wonderfully says in his book Poetas ingleses del S. XX (P.257), “en el pasado hubo una tendencia a considerar a la poesía escrita por mujeres como de un estatus inferior”. His task had been “ infravalorada y hasta cierto punto abandonada”, something that of course, would not been a radical change, above all during the second half of last century. It resulted to be in some of the cases, as the present author, a heroine for their readers who end up to identify themselves with that mixed feeling which is going to appear in many of her poems and will be object of study in this task, together with her nihilist interpretation of life. It would have no sense the simple method of quoting this author’s biographical data and some of her works. That would not focus on her literary labour. That is why I propose myself to comment both her life as well as her works, basing my references on her poems themselves. My analysis’ methodology is going to have a double sense: - On the one hand, there is a great amount of her biographical data, and it is going to help us understanding her poems. -On the other hand, it will be the author’s unconsciousness itself that I will focus my interest on. I will look for it in every single poem, the one which is going to emerge in some of her verses even when the intention or general thematic of the poem is any other. As perfectly says Ramón Buenaventura in his bilingual edition Ariel. Publishing House, Hiperion 2010, ,“la poesía no tolera más notas que aquellas que sirven para restablecer las claves que el poeta en el momento de escribir considera razonablemente comprensibles”, trying to describe those clues is, in part, the aim of this essay, bearing in mind that: ”el poeta no escribe para intermediarios”. I am interested in valorising her work through the analysis of her great topics: love and death. As far as love is concerned, her work turns around violence of passion in two streams: on the one hand, the father-child like; on the other hand, the wife like. The vision of love she offers is more and more bitter and negative.