Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of the best known and most controversial poets of the 20th century. Since her death in 1963, critical debate about her work has been lively and, at times, even hostile. This work illustrates how to read Plath from an alternative perspective, using Julia Kristeva's theory of political language, and which allows an appreciation of the poems that goes beyond the biographical by emphasising the texts instead, thereby engaging with the first person as a complex and unstable heuristic tool. Exploring the poems in terms of their transcendence rather than focusing exclusively on their meaning explores the way in which Plath's work produces a crisis of oratorical subjectivity and, from this, the 'revolutionary' nature of the poetic voice emerges.