Sylvia Plath Yashira Alvarado

Jorge GotayLaura Restrepo

Genesis Rodriguez

12 December 2013C Block

Life• Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the

Jamaica Plain neighborhood on October 27, 1932.• Died on February 11, 1963 at age of 30 by killing

herself.

• Before receiving acclaim as an professional poet and writer she attended Smith College.

Historical Context• She grew up during the WWII, she was eager to learn and move

past her sheltered, suburban upbringing.

• She expresses herself by writing.

• She was obsessed with death.

• Her poems were morbid, gloomy, and depressing that reflects how she felt about herself and her life.

• The dialectical tension between self and world is the location of meaning in Sylvia’s poems.

facts• Plath started writing poems and published her first poem at the

age of nine.• She chose to kill herself by sticking her head into an oven and

breathing the poisonous carbon monoxide fumes.

• Even in her teens, Plath was a passionate pacifist: she was publicly against the Korean War and called the dropping of the atomic bomb “a sin” in a 1950 letter to Neupert.

• She worked her way through Smith College even though she had been accepted to Wellesley for free. She worked on a farm, doing manual labor. She later turned this experience into a poem “Bitter Strawberries.“

Subjects she wrote about

• Major Themes in Plath’s writings: • Death• Victimization• Patriarchy• Nature• The Self• The Body • Motherhood

• For example she wrote about birds, bees, spring, fall, the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on

Poetic terms• Metaphor – comparison between two things that replaces the word

or name another object with of another. • poems are meant to impact complex images and feelings to a

reader.

Example in “A Birthday Present”• The whole poem is a metaphor.

Poetic terms• Personification: the attribution of a personal nature or human

characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form

Example in “A Birthday Present” “But my god, the clouds are like cotton.

Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.” – Lines 39-40

Meaning of the poem

• “A Birthday Present” means death. This poem serves a suicide letter which she wrote six months before killing herself.

• The reason why she wanted to kill herself was because she was having a lot of problems and was depressed.

• Plath’s explains how by giving herself a birthday present (death), she would be freeing herself from suffering and all the pain that comes with being alive.

“A Birthday present”

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WjHo1_W5sdg