On Sylvia Plath’s Peotry:Prespective Of Writing Psychology

Sylvia Plath is the representative poet of the Confessional School, one of the most influential schools of20th century American poetry. Died prematurely, her life is full of legends, and her relation with Ted Hughes, love and hatred, is one of the most sensational and rumored literary anecdotes. Plath’s confessional poems highly recognized for her daring revelation of privacy, emotional authenticity and frankness, and for her bold disobedience and rebellion. This thesis attempts a full scale study of her poetry, extending from her confessional poems of mature years back to poems of the middle and earlier years. With Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes as the blueprint, the thesis endeavors to survey her poems from the perspective of psychology of creative writing, in hope of constructing the logical relation between poetic creation and Plath’s psychological mechanism, outlining the dynamic relation between poet’s subjectivity, objective world and poetry, and finally summarizing distinctive features of Plath’s creative psychology.Plath’s literary life can be divided into three stages, namely, the stage of "The Colossus"(the early stage), the stage of "Crossing the Water"(the transitional stage) and the stage of "Ariel"(the summit stage). Plath’s early poems are gentle and full of love, with special attention to outer forms, which is way different from her later poems, frank and undisciplined. Her poetry is a reflection and representation of her personal life, yet reaches far beyond it at the same time, and into the presentation of personal psychological world and the subconscious. The conflict between self consciousness and feminine consciousness and reality leads to the poet’s anxiety and suicidal impulse. In addition, the impulse to enter literary history of literary works as subject drives her to experience the extreme, to develop intimacy with death, resulting in her tragedy. The thesis undergoes thorough vertical study with time as the axis, together with close reading of her poetic text. The four chapters of this thesis can be summarized as follows.Chapter one surveys the relation between Plath’s poetry and her personal life, trying to spot the objective correlative of her poetry in her life, with the purpose of investigating what materials the poet’s personal life provide her literary creation, and how the poet selects and handles these materials. On the basis of targeting the correlation between poetic themes and subjects and "objective prototype", the chapter postulates, with the empathy theory of classical Chinese literary theories, that Plath’s poetic conceptive methodology goes from the open-endedness of "object transfiguring emotion" to the exclusivity of "emotion projecting onto object", which can be verified by the analysis of some unique imagery in her poems.Chapter two focuses on the relation between Plath’s poems and the poet’s psychology and subconsciousness. The poet projects her own feelings in the empathetic process. This means the representation is transferred into a positive action, which in turn elevate poetic creation to presentation. This chapter adopts the approach of psychological study, psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s Electra complex and the theory of purification function of literature, to research into Plath’s consciousness and subconscioiusness, reading into the key to Plath’s writing:confessional poetry as the artistic route to relieve her inner conflicts and repression.Chapter three explores the conflict between the poet’s self consciousness, feminine consciousness and reality as reveled in her poems, uncovering Plath’s inner conflicts on the basis of textual analysis. The irreconcilable conflict between the awakening of the subject required by self consciousness and the subordination of females incurring by their social position conduces to her misery and pains, leading her to the verge of collapse. In addition, this chapter will illustrate how Plath challenges the patriarchy in her poems, thus formulating her individualistic feminine poetic style.Chapter four dwells on the study of death consciousness in Plath’s poems. The irreconcilability of conflict results in anxiety, which in turn stimulates Plath’s creativity. Driven by anxiety of influence and unable to find for herself ready-made ways of expression in English poetic heritage, Plath recognizes, not without misery, that the mission of writing is simply to construct a new way of verbal expression, a new symbolic system to convey personal understanding of this absurd and alienated world. In this way, writing itself becomes the subject, constantly forces Plath to surpass, ultimately doing harm to and even destroying the poet’s life.The previous four aspects constitute a progressive relationship. From these four aspects, the thesis intends to discover the correlation of literary works with the objective world, with psychology and subconsciousness, and with self consciousness, feminine consciousness and death consciousness, together with the revelation of the poet’s artistic discipline in her psychology of creation. When one poem or a poet’s poetry as a whole is regarded as organism, its growth will necessarily be conditioned by the poet’s psychology. Under the constitutive influence of various psychological elements, the poetry of Plath develops to be one with unique aesthetic values amid female poetry.