Melancholic life blow: Sylvia Plath's poetry and confessional humanity

Abstract

This subproject aims to discuss the relationships of melancholy as a lyrical subject in the poetic diction by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), especially, when it reveals aspects of the humanization process, through a confessional tone expressing existential concerns, such as recurrent themes in poetic modernity. From this perspective, the understanding of humanization that this work consents is to bring man back to himself, possible aspect through poetic apparatus. This humanizing function of poetry is one of the ways in which it survives in contemporary society, a form of resistance to the utilitarian values of modernity. From this point of view, and through contextual readings of representative poems by Sylvia Plath, this work seeks evidence between the representation of melancholy, as a “wreck-word”, and humanity as supplementary, though apparently opposite categories through bibliographic-documentary methodology. Therefore, for the theoretical foundation of this investigation were used the reflections of Paz (2018; 2019), Bosi (2000), Freud (2016) and Dos Santos (2009). Based on which the poems Elm, Event and Jiltid by poet Sylvia Plath were also analyzed. Indeed, the disintegration of the plathian lyric self transpires in verse so as to show the conception of the human through the lens of what seems impossible: the poetic word.