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

Sylvia Plath A Search for Self The incarnate body of Sylvia Plaths poetry demonstrates definitively her mastery of her craft. Plath has been criticized for her overtly autobiographical work and her unsafe pessimism, however, close study reveals that her poetry transcends categorization and has a voice uniquely her own. As Katha Pollit concluded in a 1982 Nation review, by the sentence she came to write her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other voice like hers on earth (Wagner 1). In whole kit and caboodle such as Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Morning Song, Plath relates her own painfully experiences in the form of dramatic monologues using a persona who eventually triumphs over adversity by regaining the self that had been lost before the make out of the poem. According to Plath, the narrator of Lady Lazarus has the great and terrible gift of cosmos reborn . . . she is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit (Wagner 71). In compact three-line stanzas, the speaker sardon ically comments on her unique ability and its implications. Her tone demonstrates her boredom towards the attention paid to her by the peanut-crunching crowd. Unlike the Biblical Lazarus who is called forth from the grave by Jesus, Lady Lazarus is adequate to(p) to resurrect herself and so avoids the polarities of God and Lucifer. Neither of these figures is able to exact penalty for the atrocities that man heaps on man, so the speaker transfigures herself by bring down her body to ashes and reviving her life through flame. As Leonard Sanazaro points out, This willfulness to splay and devour humankind in the form of a self-fulfilled deity points up the impotence of the traditional concepts of good and evil (Wagner 90) Lady Lazarus transcends these boundaries. The imagery utilize throughout the poem is associated with the treatment of the Jews by the national socialists in concentration camps during military man War II. Plath addresses the inhumanity of the situation, using s uch phrases as A prevention 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 often been criticized for relating her hardships to that of the Jews. After all, she grew up in a relatively horse barn and affluent home and received an excellent education her suffering was in her mind. Plath said specifically that her poems had come