Jessica Silva – Week 2, Question 1

Sylvia Plath's poetry is considered "confessional poetry". Do a bit of investigation, find out what you can about confessional poetry and its roots, and explain how this poem conforms to that genre.

Confessional poetry is defined as poetry that strips away all that the poet has been hiding behind, and exposes his or her private life. Before confessional poetry, the subject matter of poetry implicitly included little to no insight into the poet’s private life, and instead focused on public issues via the use of a detached persona. Plath is characterized as a confessional poet partially because of her discussion of her recurrent suicide attempts and life experiences overall: in “Daddy,” Plath confesses her feelings of hatred and fear towards her father, while also implying that she married “a model of [him].” Plath’s father died when she was only eight years old, and she is thought to have adored him as a young girl, leaving the reader to question where her hatred could possibly stem from.  “Daddy” is a prime example on confessional poetry because it exposes Plath’s feelings of abandonment, and how her father’s death left her at odds with his memory – to the extent of likening the two to a German Nazi and a Jew. However, the majority of Plath’s hatred seemingly stems from the idea that she felt as though her father left her to claw through life searching for someone similar to her father just for the sake of filling the void, and how in the end, “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two”: she had to distance herself not only from her husband, but from the memory of her father in order to be at peace.