Sylvia Plath: A Level Poetry

Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is perhaps best defined by the vivid imagery that delves deep into her psyche.  Plath explores dimensions of herself: her past, present, and future; her demons; her place in the world. Time and time again, her poetry seems to return to essential questions about Plath’s identity. If not providing a clear answer, then we must simply track the complexity and even impossibility of any single answer.

While Plath is a poet whose distressing life story is hard to completely ignore when discussing her work, our discussion ismostly focussed on her words, not her personal fight with depression.

We take an example of an unseen poem and talk through how the exam question might be attempted. In this short course, we're using Sylvia Plath's "Arrival of a Bee Box"  and one or two others, as an example of how to approach a difficult text and work through the various aspects to arrive at a reasonable level of comprehension.

This is just a taster course, and a few further examples and fuller treatments of the A Level English Lit course are provided in subsequent videos with resource links.