Sylvia Plath: A Search for Self :: Biography Biographies Essays

Sylvia Plath A Search for Self The collective dust of Sylvia Plaths poetry demonstrates definitively her mastery of her craft. Plath has been criticized for her overtly autobiographical work and her suicidal pessimism, however, closemouthed study reveals that her poetry transcends categorization and has a voice remarkablely her own. As Katha Pollit concluded in a 1982 Nation review, by the time she came to keep open her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other(a) voice like hers on earth (Wagner 1). In works much(prenominal) as Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Morning Song, Plath relates her own painfully experiences in the course of dramatic monologues using a persona who eventually triumphs over blow by regaining the self that had been lost before the struggle of the poem. check to Plath, the narrator of Lady Lazarus has the great and terrible gift of being converted . . . she is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit (Wagner 71). In compact three-line stanzas, the speaker sardonically comments on her unique ability and its implications. Her tone demonstrates her boredom towards the attention paid to her by the peanut-crunching crowd. distant the Biblical Lazarus who is called forth from the grave by Jesus, Lady Lazarus is able to produce herself and so avoids the polarities of God and Lucifer. Neither of these figures is able to exact punishment for the atrocities that gentleman heaps on man, so the speaker transfigures herself by reducing her soundbox to ashes and reviving her life through flame. As Leonard Sanazaro points out, This willfulness to arise and bolt down valetkind in the form of a self-fulfilled deity points up the impotency of the traditional concepts of good and evil (Wagner 90) Lady Lazarus transcends these boundaries. The imagery used end-to-end the poem is associated with the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis in concentration camps during World war II. Plath addresses the inhumanity of the situation, using such phrases as A cake of soap,/A wedding ring,/A gold filling to represent a human being. Plath also alludes to the medical experimentation that was practiced by the Nazi doctors. Plath has much been criticized for relating her hardships to that of the Jews. After all, she grew up in a relatively stable and sozzled home and received an excellent education her suffering was in her mind. Plath tell specifically that her poems had come