Negotiating with Self: A Critical Study of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

Like coruscating comet, Sylvia Plath is an iridescent star illuminating the firmament of American English Poetry. She is highly venerated and viewed as a cult figure in modern American poetry. The entire corpus of her poetry is emblematic of her personal pain, her personality, and regressive recantation with the outward forces and   outer world’s menace. Her poetry is the eternal destination where the chariot of her creativity and life yearns to reach to. Her ‘Self’ in different guises turns mordant metaphor in her poetic pursuit; her Self becomes leit motif in her entire journey of poetic excellence. She observes the outer world with keen observant eye and sees life from the serene spectacle of death. The dynamics of the perspectives of her poetry enthusiastically explores variegated conflicts and complexities of life her negotiation with her selves unabashedly. Towards the fag-end of her brilliant poetic career, her philosophy of life soaked in all vigour, verve and vim converges into the cool confluence of her divided selves. Surprisingly, she perspicaciously peels of the different layers circumscribed around her with psychic honesty and flawless artistic excellence, and opens heart to her readers nonchalantly. Hurts, hate and haze doesn’t petrify her, instead vivifies her fortitude to supersede seething solitude.