The Unitive Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

I SHALL never get you put together entirely, frets the scrubgirl who scrambles over the gigantic ruins in the title poem of Sylvia Plath's first volume, Colossus. Although the poem primarily concerns the poet's obsession with her longdead father, her love that is mostly hate and her desire that is mostly deathwish, The also assigns the chore of her poetry: cleaning up and piecing together fragments, debris, to make something immaculate, superhuman, and whole. Read as continuum and totality, the poems of Colossus and her second volume, A riel, tell of Plath's attempt to reconcile guilty, mortal history (her own and humanity's) with some pure, immortal, perpetual moment. things of this life-man's ignorant destruction of the earth even while he dependently wallows in it, the mass murders of Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen, the sinister threats of the atomic bomb and radioactive fallout, and the unearthly devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-all troubled her sight. look into her own mirror, a gaze more and more brutally honest as she aged, also disturbed her as she discovered a wildly irrational hatred for her father, Otto Emil Plath, a German-born entomologist, resentment for her husband, British poet Ted Hughes, and their children,