16 pages • 32 minutes read
Lady Lazarus
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Background
Literary Context
Students and scholars of literature understand Sylvia Plath as a contributor to Confessional poetry, a poetic style that emerged out of Post-Modernism and the Beat poets of the 1950s. This poetry is different than other kinds of poetry because it relies on certain knowledge about the Poet and their personal life in order to fully decode and unpack the meaning of the poems. Confessional poems often resemble diary-style confessions and deep introspective truths about the poet’s inner psyche. Loose rules of poetic forms and structures allow Confessional poets to communicate their emotions and ideas as freely as they wish.
Contemporary critics believe this kind of revealing and intimate poetic style marks a revolution in poetry that places greater importance on the poet themselves. Confessional poets often used direct, unsophisticated or colloquial language and speech-like rhythms in their works to reveal shocking or difficult psychological experiences like childhood trauma and mental illness. Because their work is grounded in their own personal experiences and refers to real people and actual events, it resists the notion of poems as universal messages subject to interpretation.
Confessional poetry emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in America. In addition to Sylvia Plath, Confessional poets like John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Sexton have shaped American poetry. Their influence remains present even today in pop music and contemporary poetry, though detractors sometimes argue the genre is depressing, egotistical, and self-pitying.
Authorial Context
Sylvia Plath often wrote about themes of death and suicide in her work, while also exploring her troubled relationships with her family members. Some scholars emphasize her cynicism and hopelessness, while others choose to analyze her brutal language. Still others consider Plath’s poetic voice as a feminist voice filled with power and a desire to avenge women who live in a male-dominated society. Plath’s ability to write about emotions in a raw and unguarded way may stem from her early experiences with traumatic loss, chronic depression and what contemporary doctors would diagnose as bipolar disorder, which is characterized by periods of mania followed by much longer periods of depression. Even today, bipolar disorder is a serious health concern, but in the 1960s, no effective medications or treatments existed, and Plath endured harsh treatments like unanesthetized electro-shock therapy and prolonged isolation.
In addition to Plath’s personal health difficulties, her relationship with her husband Ted Hughes was also tumultuous. Plath wrote letters at the end of her marriage that have recently surfaced, describing physical abuse and infidelity. Hughes’s own literary reputation and the sensation of Plath’s death created a storm of opinions surrounding the couple and Hughes’s role in Plath’s early death by suicide. “Lady Lazarus” is perhaps Plath’s most haunting poem, as it alludes to her past suicide attempts within the context of resurrection, and the poem predicts that she will die, or attempt to die, five more times. The eeriest part of this particular work concerns a kind of dramatic irony, as readers of the poem likely know that on the speaker’s fourth attempt to die, she will not be resurrected again.
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By Sylvia Plath
