Feminism

Sylvia Plath founded a style of feminist poetry that has almost completely receded. Arriving as she did at the head of the women's rights movement, Plath's poetry partly set the stage for the feverish experiments in consciousness that followed soon; it was comparable to, say, Malcolm X's militancy auguring the civil rights movement. Today one finds little poetry that stands up well to Plath's urgent retort to patriarchy, militarism and domesticity.

Consider "Lady Lazarus," where Plath writes, "Soon, soon the flesh / the grave cave ate will be / At home on me // And I a smiling woman. / I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die." And later in the same poem, "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. // I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I've a call." The words are often monosyllabic, direct ripostes to the over-elaborate doubletalk of politics and domesticity, which obfuscates injustice.

"Lady Lazarus" is a direct assault on time as well, which melts people into defined characters, reduces women to instruments of pleasure or pain. Fearlessness, in Ariel, does not come across as posture or imposture. So in "Elm" she says: "I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. / Scorched to the root / My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires." Everywhere there is a conflagration in progress, a wild fire, eviscerating necessary distinctions between observer and observed, nature and humankind, fact and interpretation. The malign thing within her is within all of us as well, if only we had the courage to articulate real pain: "I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/sylvia-plath-death-anniversary_b_2672685.html