Sylvia Plath Allusions

Sylvia Plath is known as a confessional poet by many because she refers to different people that were close to her during her lifetime in many of her poems. “Daddy” is mostly connected to her father because she creates many allusions that link to her father’s private life. The structure of “Daddy” is unique to Plath’s situation of a deceased father because the word “you” is used very many times throughout each of the stanzas, and this makes the poem sound like a confrontation. By including connections between the speaker’s father in “Daddy” and Sylvia Plath’s own father, she creates the effect of talking directly to her father with the family voice of “you.” Plath includes references to her father’s death in her poem, as well as allusions to the cause of his death and his daughter’s young age when she experienced his death. As different authors discuss Otto Plath’s

The gangrene is Otto Plath’s toe is what led to his leg amputation, and it is also believed that the gangrene was a cause of death. Because of this, the audience sees that Plath discusses her father’s health issues in her poem. This, along with other references to Otto Plath’s personal life in “Daddy,” allows readers to see the strong relationship between Plath’s work and her father. There are many instances in “Daddy” that allude to Otto Plath and his private life, including when he was a professor and the different places he lived throughout his lifetime. In Roger Platizky’s article, “Plath’s Daddy,” he discusses in the final paragraph her father’s historical connections to Plath’s work. One historical reference included would be the fact that Plath wrote “Daddy” on the twentieth anniversary of her father’s leg amputation, which is alluded to in the poem (Platizky 106). This shows the readers that the author of “Daddy” took her own personal connections with her father’s medical history and subtly placed it into her own work. Another example of the mutual relationship