Sylvia Plath Critical Quotations

“Writing was something Sylvia did not to

please others, but to please herself” — Heather Clark

“Pioneered the

poetry of motherhood” — Clark

“Challenged the male romantic notion that

the moorland outside her door was more sublime than her baby’s nursery” — Clark

After her father’s death, the first 9 years of her life “sealed

themselves off like a ship in a bottle” — Plath

After Frieda’s birth in 1960, Plath became increasingly domestic, with “no life […]

except household chores” — Plath

Plath called baby Frieda “very

amusing”

Plath was not “self

conscious” about poetry, and considered nursery rhymes poems

Plath and Hughes regarded their marriage as a kind of

"telepathic union”

In a letter to her mother, Plath described herself as “a veritable

convert to the Bronte clan”

“Because of Wuthering Heights”, Plath

“wanted to be Cathy” — Bates

“Images of landscapes and animals are consistently turned into metaphors

for the human intruder’s feeling of being insignificant and exposed” — Lindberg-Seyersted

“Plath is an identity reduced to desperate

statements about her dilemma as a passive witness to a turbulent natural world” — J. Carol Oates

[About Ariel] “In a curious way, the poems

read as though they were written posthumously” — Alvarez

In Ariel, “the horrifying experiences of living are

transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet” — McClanahan

Plath’s later poems are akin “to playing

Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder” — Lowell

“The last thing I wanted was […] to

be the place an arrow shoots off from” — Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted change and excitement and to

shoot off in all directions myself” — Plath, The Bell Jar

“Spare me from the relentless cage

of routine and rote” — Plath’s diary, aged 17

“Otto Plath is an ever-present

spectre in Plath’s poems” — Austen

“It is difficult to identify discrete

themes in Plath’s verse; they are all interrelated” — Austen

[Daddy] “ a poem of

remarkable passion” — Austen

‘Daddy’ is ‘the cry of the 8 year old

against the ‘black man’ - the father” — Austen

In ‘Tulips’, Plath “expresses the beguiling

lure of self-abandonment” — Austen

“The passivity” of ‘Tulips’ “has an attractiveness

with which one can identify” — Austen

“The natural world has its

magic for her” — Austen

Though “qualified”, “in motherhood Plath seems

to have found a genuine sense of wellbeing and worth” — Austen

‘Daddy’ was “the first jet of flame from

a literary dragon ” — Time

“When the curtain goes down, it is her own

dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot” — Hardwick

In ‘Full Fathom Five’, “enjambment moves the

poem like waves” — Caton

Plath’s early childhood was “intensely

literary” — Clark

The sea is a “central metaphor for my childhood,

my poems, and the artist’s subconscious” — Plath

In ‘Full Fathom Five’, the ‘father image’ relates

“to my own father, the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted” — Plath

[About ‘Daddy’] “The Guernica

of modern poetry” — Steiner

[In reference to Full Fathom Five] “Pearls sea changed from the ubiquitous

grit of sorrow and dull routine” — Plath

[About Daddy] “Elevates her sense of her own suffering

to a level which is itself obscene” — Austen

Home was “not a place

for authentic selfhood” (Dobbs)

Plath’s “dawn poems” were “written

in blood”