Research Paper On Sylvia Plath

During the mid 20th century, a time in which poetry exposed personal accounts of the narrators, Sylvia Plath began her poetic journey to become one of the well renown writers. As every poet seeks inspiration, whether it be of the empathy for others or the act of pure imagination, Plath’s approach to expressing emotions was derived from a different source- her firsthand experiences. As W.H. Auden famously said, “Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.” It is through poetry that she was able to convey her raw feelings of loneliness, depression, and dejection. Sylvia Plath’s rough childhood and early adulthood affected her writing as evidenced in the confessional poem Mirror where she presents the conflicting themes of youth vs aging

Born on October 27 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath was the daughter of Aurelia Schober, a Boston University graduate, and Otto Plath, a professor of German and biology. At a young age, her family fell on hard times as Plath’s father suffered from an embolism, caused by undiagnosed diabetes, which ultimately led to his death in 1940. Losing her father haunted Sylvia, who at the impressionable age of eight watched as someone she loved died after a long, painful illness. This traumatic experience would serve as inspiration for her poignant poem Daddy. Two years later, Aurelia moved with her children and her parents to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to teach medical secretarial courses and took on the burden of running the family on her own. Although Plath’s mother did her best to provide her children with the finest education possible, Sylvia's early years were marked by insecurities about money and social status, and an anxious sense of self-doubt she masked as both a child and adult. Years later, during the summer of 1953, Plath worked as a guest

The origins of this stylistic poetry have been traced back to English romantic poets, especially to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote autobiographical verse about their intimate explorations of the mind. Taking a similar approach, Sylvia Plath’s constructed several poems where she “seldom bothered to create a persona through whom she could project feelings.” Such qualities of her writing are significantly prominent in her poem Mirror, which is a “variation on the theme of searching for self in reflection because the woman in the mirror is seeing a reflection.” At first glance, it is apparent that the overall structure of the poem itself, is not idle. In fact it is quite the contrary. The two stanze layout of the poem, in essence represents a mirror’s image- with each stanza a reflection of the other. Throughout this poem, Plath presents the reader with ongoing themes- youth vs aging and desire vs reality- as she employs dry humor, allusion, and a change in tone. The poem starts off as a child’s riddle, as the reader is not clearly informed about who exactly the “I” is referring to- the woman or the mirror. But, the clues soon make it evident that the speaker of poem is in fact the mirror, that is made to be a statement of neutrality as it is simply doing its