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.