Ideology in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

With its distinctive poetic forms and themes, Sylvia Plaths poetry patently epitomizes her personal and artistic struggle as a woman writer to be part of a largely male-dominated canon. In Ideology in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Ikram Hili examines the difficulties that Plath encountered while drafting her poems, as she wrestled with what to reveal to, or conceal from, the reading publica literary exertion that is even more visible when studying the poets manuscripts of published and unpublished poems. While examining the influence of ideology on Plaths poetics, Hili traces different stages of the poets literary journey, as she moves from restriction, repression, and containment towards a liberating phase during which she carves out her own body of writing. Detaching herself from the rigid, crippling formalism of her earlier years, Plath confronts her own indecisiveness as a poet, cleans up her messy drafts, and embarks on an aesthetic healing process. The literary body that she aims to construct is no longer confined within the great writing tradition that she once perceived as predominantly male; nor is it perfect. It is a perfected body, the result of a process into which Plaths captivated readers have also entered.