Email this article 
ECHO OR REPETITION IN THE POETRY OF SYLVIA PLATH
Abstract
The aim of this article is to give an insight into the use of the echo or repetition in the poetry of the American poet Sylvia Plath. The echo or repetition covers most of the poems of the poetic volume Ariel, but many questions arise on the use of this technique by Plath. There are different opposing viewpoints that discuss the fact if this technique was used deliberately or not. The reason of using it is most appropriately given by the psychological approach. According to Freud’s case-stories, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, repetitions are done unconsciously and are related to isolation. In most of her poems Plath shows the speaker entrapped in the cage of her mind and in the state of a child, this is also shown by the fact that she continuously repeats words or phrases. Plath, herself, was very addicted to Freud and Jung and very often found herself in their case-stories. Repetitions are mostly used during the last years of Plath’s life during which she became one with the speaker of her poems and this was a way of expressing and controlling her anger in the “shriek” poems. This technique is part of the rebirth and transcendence poems, which are symbols of repetition.
Article visualizations:
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Freud, S. (2010). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mansfield Centre, Ct: Martino Publishing.
Gill, J. (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: University Press of Cambridge.
Kendall, T. (2001). Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. New York: Faber and Faber.
Plath. S. (2000). Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Karen Kukil (Ed.). London: Anchor Books Editions
Plath, S. (2004). Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: Harper Perennial / Modern Classics.
Rose, J. (1992). The Hunting of Sylvia Plath. USA: Harvard University Press.
Rosenblatt, J. (1979). Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Van Dyne, S. R. (1993). Revising Life. USA: University of North Carolina Press.
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.
Copyright © 2018-2023. European Journal of Literary Studies (ISSN 2601-971X / ISSN-L 2601-971X). All rights reserved.
This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.
