She shied away from using genteel language and avoided writing only of traditionally "female" topics. She depicted the bleakness of the domestic scene, the disappointment of pregnancy, the despair over her husband's infidelity, her tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her own creative voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. Plath explored and challenged this reductionist tendency through her work, offering poems of intense vitality and stunning language. Women who ventured into the arts found it difficult to attain much attention for their work, and were often subject to marginalization and disdain. Women were expected to remain safely ensconced in the house, with motherhood as their ultimate joy and goal. Plath lived and worked in 1950s/1960s England and America, societies characterized by very strict gender norms. However, in her later poems, she seems finally able to transcend her status as victim by fully embracing her creative gifts ("Ariel"), metaphorically killing her father ("Daddy"), and committing suicide ("Lady Lazarus", "Edge"). For instance, "A Life" evokes a menacing and bleak future for Plath. Her poems from the "Colossus" era express her frustration over the strictures under which she operated. Plath felt relegated to a subordinate, "feminine" position which stripped from her any autonomy or power.
Her husband also victimized her through the power he exerted as a man, both by assuming he should have the literary career and through his infidelity. In regards to her father, she realized she could never escape his terrible hold over her she expressed her sense of victimhood in "The Colossus" and "Daddy," using powerful metaphors and comparisons to limn a man who figured heavily in her psyche. Her poetry can often be understood as response to these feelings of victimization, and many of the poems with a male figure can be interpreted as referring to any or all of these male forces in her life. Plath felt like a victim to the men in her life, including her father, her husband, and the great male-dominated literary world. This desire is exhilaratingly expressed in " Ariel," and bleakly and resignedly expressed in "Edge." Death is an immensely vivid aspect of Plath's work, both in metaphorical and literal representations.
#THE COLOSSUS SYLVIA PLATH FREE#
The poems suggest it would release her from the difficulties of life, and bring her transcendence wherein her mind could free itself from its corporeal cage. Suicide, though, is presented as a desirable alternative in many of these works. She sneers that everyone is used to crowding in and watching her self-destruct. In " Lady Lazarus," she claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying to kill herself multiple times. In "Daddy," she goes further in claiming that she wants to kill him herself, finally exorcising his vicious hold over her mind and her work.ĭeath is also dealt with in terms of suicide, which eerily corresponds to her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide. In "The Colossus," she tries in vain to put him back together again and make him speak. In "Full Fathom Five," she speaks of his death and burial, mourning that she is forever exiled. One common theme is the void left by her father's death.
Plath's first volume of poetry and the only collection published during her lifetime, The Colossus and Other Stories, contains many of Plath's most highly regarded confessional poems, including "The Manor Garden", "A Winter Ship", "Moonrise", "The Hermit at Outermost House", and "The Beekeeper's Daughter".Death is an ever-present reality in Plath's poetry, and manifests in several different ways. Saxton fellowship to complete her first novel, The Bell Jar, which was published shortly before her death in 1963. After attending Cambridge University on a Fulbright grant, she taught at Smith and won a number of prizes for her poetry as well as a Eugene F.
An exceptional example.īorn in Boston in 1932, American poet Sylvia Plath's writing first attracted notice when she was still a student at Smith College and won the Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest. Typography, binding, and jacket design by Vincent Torre.
Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with a touch of shelfwear. First American edition of Plath’s first collection of poetry, the only volume published during her lifetime.
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