Death is considered to be one of the frequent topics in literature. In literary pieces, authors tend to explore this specific theme due to the fact that they may want to understand it better. Some authors and poets may have faced death or have been close to it, and in their works they want to share their experience. Sylvia Plath, who was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, and belonged to the confessional poetry movement, was one of such authors. The aim of this paper is to find out whether there are some aspects, themes or symbols of the motif of death that appear in the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath and if so, what role they play there and to what extent they influence the understanding of the poem.
Confessional Poetry began as one of many artistic movements in post-war twentieth-century America. This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and mainly focused on the poet’s own experience and real situations which were mirrored in their works. As Gill points out:

Confession, then is not a means of expressing the irrepressible truth of prior lived experience, but a ritualized technique for producing truth. [. . .] It is not the free expression of the self but an effect of an ordered regime by which the self begins to conceive of itself as individual, responsible, culpable and thereby confessional. Most importantly, confession takes place in a context of power, and prohibition, and surveillance. It is generated and sustained not by