"Mad Girl's Love Song" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in villanelle form that was published in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, a New York based magazine geared toward young women.
After her suicide, "Mad Girl's Love Song" appeared in the afterword of the reprint of The Bell Jar.
[3] In this poem, the refrains are the lines, "I think I made you up inside my head" and "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead".
[4] The same psychobiographical schema notes that while writing "Mad Girl's Love Song" Plath continued to struggle with nightmares and dissociative episodes that made her doubt her reality, possibly informing the writing of her poem where the speaker started in control of the three realities: day dreaming about a lover, shutting her eyes to welcome death, and opening them up in a form of rebirth, however at the end of the poem the speaker loses control of the three realities.
[2] "Mad Girl's Love Song" served as a catalyst for authors Greenberg and Klaver to publish a feminist criticism of the attack on Sylvia Plath's legitimacy and prestige, which they cite as having occurred since the publication of "Mad Girl's Love Song" and long after Plath's death.
[2] Greenberg echoes this sentiment, noting that Plath was not nuanced in referencing mental illness and heartbreak within her poetry, namely "Mad Girl's Love Song", but because she was a young woman she was labeled as mentally ill or crazed young girl rather than celebrated as an iconic poet.