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This thesis aims to analyze the multifaceted elements of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry, particularly its connections to visual art and female experience.

April 3, 2026Open Access

The Multiple Facets of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poetry

Key Points

This thesis aims to analyze the multifaceted elements of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry, particularly its connections to visual art and female experience.
Explores Plath's poetry from 1957 to 1963 with a focus on art influences.
Analyzes specific poems from 'The Colossus and Other Poems' and 'Collected Poems'.
Applies ekphrastic theory to understand the interplay between poetry and visual art.
Examines 'Three Women' for its use of lyric voice and dramatic monologue.
Demonstrates the strong influence of visual art on Plath’s poetry.
Finds that Plath's writing reflects the complexities of female subjectivity in the 1950s.
Highlights how Plath uses poetic forms to convey dramatic intensity and emotions.

Abstract

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.

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