Sylvia Plath- a personal response

Sylvia Plath


(Sample paper) Write a personal response to the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Support the points you make by reference to the poetry of Plath you have studied.

Sylvia Plath was a bright, intelligent and determined young woman with a burning desire to write. She wrote incessantly during her short life – poetry, short stories, essays, articles. She was an outstanding student but often experienced self-doubt and depression and her work clearly reflects a wide range of emotions. She always sought perfection, often writing, and rewriting, her poetry until she was completely satisfied. She almost created a language for herself and this, combined with her startling images, make her poems truly unique. Her last poems are generally seen as her outstanding achievement. Here she appears to have truly found her voice expressing herself in a distinctive, unique style. She was even aware of this while writing them as she wrote to her mother that “I am a writer… I am a genius of...