The Multiple Facets of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poetry

In my thesis I will explore the multiple facets of the late period of Sylvia Plath’s poetic writing, ranging from 1957 to 1963, and her drawing on other art forms for the composition of her writings. In particular, in my first chapter, I will discuss and analyse Plath’s sequence of art poems, some of them contained in the collection The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and the others in the Collected Poems (1981) edition, inspired by Giorgio de Chirico’s, Paul Klee’s and Henry Rousseau’s paintings. With emphasis placed on ekphrastic theory, I will attempt to shed light on the interwoven and mutually informed relationship that develops between Plath’s poetic writing and the artists’ paintings in order to highlight the formers’ creative practice. In my second chapter, I will focus on the 1962 piece “Three Women” included in Plath’s posthumous poetry collection Winter Trees (1971), which Plath wrote for the BBC radio programme. Attention here will be paid to how Plath resorts to the lyric voice and the dramatic monologue in order to intensify the dramatic and visual intensity of her writing. At the same time, Plath illuminates the condition of the female subjectivity of the 1950s, especially as regards motherhood in the aftermath of World War II and in the middle of the Cold War.