Analysis Of Sylvia Plath s Poem, She Stripped Away The...

Sylvia Plath, born in 1932 in Boston, was a very unique poet who helped redefine the landscape of poetry by illustrating the potential for it to be a deeply personal art form. In an article dedicated to the memories of Sylvia Plath, Margaret Rees writes: â€Å"She stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.† As Rees shows, Plath’s poetry brought to light new and saddening, yet realistic voices of what it meant to be an American; images of death, depression, and intense family struggles that helped paint an image of a darker America that hadn’t been fully explored before. As a result of Plath’s decision to adopt an autobiographical approach in her poetry as a way to express her own experiences and sentiments, she is often associated with fellow poets, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, as a pioneer of the â€Å"confessional poetry† style of writing. Specifically, in Plath’s Daddy, the dichotomy between the lighthearted movement of the poem through its child-like nursery rhyme style, and the dark allusions to historical events and her own dismal life is illustrative of the distinct antithesis between her stable external appearance and damaged internal reality. In the first stanza of the poem, the light rhyme pattern is mismatched with the