The Father as Muse in Sylvia Plath's Poetry

Abstract

Notes

¹See, for example, Gayle Wurst's Voice and Vision (202); Deryn Rees-Jones' “Liberty Belles and Founding Fathers: Sylvia Plath's The Colossus” (276–77); and “Poet as Daughter, or Father as Muse?” chapter 4 in Robyn Marsack's Sylvia Plath.

²A similar feminist interrogation of the concept of the muse may be found in the Introduction to Francine Prose's The Lives of the Muses.

³The image of the blood-sucking vampire/father appears in “Daddy”; the image of the sunken father surfacing appears in “Full Fathom Five”; and the father is associated with blackness in “Man in Black,” “Little Fugue,” and “Daddy.”

⁴A useful exploration of this subject may be found in “Sylvia Plath: Occultism as Source and Symptom,” chapter 6 in Timothy Materer's Modernist Alchemy.