Premium
Sylvia Plath: Talented Poet Torturec Woman
Author(s) -
Reilly Erline
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
perspectives in psychiatric care
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.538
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1744-6163
pISSN - 0031-5990
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-6163.1978.tb00929.x
Subject(s) - poetry , tragedy (event) , rage (emotion) , power (physics) , literature , creativity , maturity (psychological) , art , history , psychoanalysis , psychology , law , political science , social psychology , physics , quantum mechanics
Sylvia Plath committed suicide rather than succumb to the murderous rage which she felt toward her children. Her critics attribute the surge of power in her poetry in the last three years of her life to “maturity.” All have neglected the coincidence of pregnancy and a change in the quality and content of her work. Sylvia Plath's poetry moves from a flicker of chagrin in the first months of pregnancy to unmitigated fury as her life is inundated by the demands of poet become mother. Talent was the leveler: each poem served as a container into which she could pour the unacceptable. When creativity could no longer confine the massive upsurge of fury, Sylvia Plath died rather than destroy the sanctity of motherhood. But her struggle is documented. The tragedy is that society chose not to hear her poetry as the truth expressed by a talented poet who was, at the same time, a tortured woman.