Daddy (poem)
It was at Cambridge University where she met Ted Hughes, a young Yorkshire poet, and they wed in the summer of June 1956.
Yet at the same time, she contrasted those dark subject matters with themes of joy, in hand with a deeper understanding of the numerous hindering functions of women.
These poems were composed of Plath's anger as a woman who felt oppressed by her parents' expectations of her, society's hindering roles in place for women, and by her ex-husband's unfaithfulness.
Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" had very dark tones and imagery including death and suicide, in addition to the Holocaust.
For instance, critic Robert Phillips wrote, "Finally the one way [Plath] was to achieve relief, to become an independent Self, was to kill her father's memory, which, in 'Daddy,' she does by a metaphorical murder.
From its opening image onward, that of the father as an "old shoe" in which the daughter has lived for thirty years—an explicitly phallic image, according to the writings of Freud—the sexual pull and tug is manifest, as is the degree of Plath's mental suffering, supported by references to Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen.
They essentially make the same argument as Phillips as they also write that "[Plath] accentuates linguistically the speaker's reliving of her childhood.
Using the heavy cadences of nursery rhyme and baby words such as 'chuffing,' 'achoo,' and 'gobbledygoo,' she employs a technical device similar to Joyce's in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the child's simple perspective is reflected through language.
"[8] The lecturer of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam and author Rudolph Glitz argues the poem could be interpreted additionally as a break-up letter.
Narbeshuber argued the objectified female form had been previously displayed was now confronting and renouncing the oppressive and social as well as cultural norms that dehumanized women.
Plath identified with the persecuted Jews, the marginalized and the hidden, as her body had been stolen from her and divided into articles belonging to the Nazis to do as they wished with them.
[10] Critic George Steiner referred to "Daddy" as "the Guernica of modern poetry", arguing that it "achieves the classic art of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all".
The power struggles throughout "Daddy" appeared to be explicitly gendered as the speaker is generally female and spoke out to expose and get back at men.
Murphy explained that the power structure would remain intact, yet Plath imagined herself being the one in control and tormenting her tormentors.
Gwynn published The Narcissiad, which literary critic Robert McPhillips later dubbed, "a Popean mock epic lambasting contemporary poets".
[14] In The Narcissiad, Gwynn parodied both the clichés, excesses, and legacy of Sylvia Plath's confessional poetry in the following words:
