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Sylvia Plath Research Paper

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Sylvia Plath and Her Poetry Sylvia Plath was a short story writer and poet who was mostly known for her collections of poetry. Plath is considered the emancipator of “confessional poetry”: poetry that focuses around personal trauma (“A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry”). In her lifetime, she wrote many poems that were gathered together into seven collections; only one of them published before she committed suicide in 1963. It was very obvious that the struggles in Plath’s life such as the passing of her father, her severe depression, and a vicious divorce, heavily influenced her poetry (Mays). Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27th, 1932. Her mother was a student at Boston University and her father was a German immigrant …show more content…
She was the editor of the college’s newspaper and also landed the very prestigious job as a guest editor at Mademoiselle Magazine. Even though Plath seemed to have a very promising future, she became very depressed around this time in her adult life. She received electroconvulsive therapy for this depression, but it didn’t seem to relieve it at all. It resulted in Plath making her first suicide attempt by crawling underneath her house and attempting to overdose on her mother’s sleeping pills. She survived her attempt and was put under psychiatric care for six months, receiving more shock and insulin shock treatment. All of these events that occurred in this particular time in her life inspired her to write her novel, The Bell Jar. She recovered and returned to Smith College in 1955. She then received a scholarship to attend Newnham College, an extension of Cambridge College in England, where she continued to participate fully in the college newspaper as well as writing her own poetry on the …show more content…
She wrote this poem in 1961, but it was not published until after her death. This piece is again in first person, but is put in the perspective of a mirror. She first explains herself as the mirror looking at the wall in front of her, explaining how she has looked at it for a very long time; how only faces and darkness separate them. She then compares herself to a lake that a woman looks into to see her reflection. The woman comes and goes during the day and appears every morning, eventually becoming frustrated with her appearance. Plath describes that the woman has drowned a young girl in her (the lake) and only comes back to see an old woman looking back at her. This poem indicates that the woman looking into the mirror finds that her outward appearance is very important to her. This can be implied on the fact that she comes back to the mirror every day to see herself, but more importantly that she becomes frustrated by her reflection. This poem greatly pertains to Plath’s life. She wrote the poem in the same year that she discovered her husband having an affair behind her back. This poem could have to do with the fact that she didn’t feel young or sexually appealing enough for her husband anymore, and that is what caused him to

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