The two-world division in the poetry of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to trace the artistic evolution in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Early in her life she established in her work a philosophical bifurcation which continued through much of her poetry. On the one hand, she was drawn towards a world of stark "reality": bleak, scientific and oppressive; on the other, she created a world of dream, a world of private imagination in which she expanded and compressed "reality" at will. This latter world afforded the poet the necessary escape from the often cruel and insensitive former one.