Intro to Literature
Poetry Analysis
Due: 2-23-18
Poetry Analysis: “Daddy” and “How Do I Love Thee”
Sylvia Plath was an author in the Modern Era in which she wrote her poem entitled “Daddy” (Plath). In her poem, Plath reflects the Modern Era in which her attitude and words convey the relationship she had with her father. The second author, Elizabeth Barrett Browning with her poem, “How Do I Love Thee” (Barrett Browning) was a poet in the Victorian Era. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem fits into the Victorian Era with the use of archaic language along visual images to describe her love relationship and she will love.
Sylvia Plath with her poem, “Daddy,” is apart of the school known as Modernist Poetry. The Modernist Era was a …show more content…
Modernist used words as a game and during this people began to realize the differing worldview of people across the nations (“The Twentieth Century, Modernism and Modernity’’). The Modern Era came after World War I which came to have an immense effect on the people of this time causing dissatisfaction with leaders because of the way the people had been treated (“The Twentieth Century, Modernism and Modernity”). Poets then voiced their discontentment through their poetry which later became known as Modernist Poetry. One such example of this poetry would become a very well known poem, “Daddy.” Reading through the poems of Sylvia Plath it becomes apparent that her writing fits right in. In the biography of Plath, her poetry is described as “poems that have been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice” (“Sylvia Plath”). Another …show more content…
“Daddy” presents a relationship once full of love and admiration, but turned sour with death. In this poem, Plath comes to loathe her father because she felt as though he had abandoned her and the thought of this terrorized her along with crushing her self-identity. The end result caused her to take her own life. In the second poem, “How Do I Love Thee,” the love relationship presented is quite the opposite as it is one of undying love for her husband. Plath and Browning were both crucially impacted by the era in which they wrote but in immensely different ways. Plath was born in the Modern Era, a time in which everything was being questioned, particularly the authoritative figures in one's life. The Modernist Era took away one's feeling of self and individualism much like Plath lost herself with the death of her father. The Modernist Era greatly affected her writing because she like everyone else of the time was trying to find herself. In her writing, she was able to express these feeling becoming popular because she was able to voice what everyone else was feeling. Browning on the other hand was influenced by the Victorian Era because during this period people and their views were beginning to change. In years before her writing would never have been accepted, but because of the changes in society, she was able to