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Spinster - Sylvia Plath
Spinster - Sylvia Plath
During her last three years Plath abandoned the restraints and conventions that had
bound much of her early work.
She wrote with great speed, producing poems of stark self-revelation and confession.
The anxiety, confusion, and doubt that haunted her were transmuted into verses of
great power and pathos borne on flashes of incisive wit.
Her poem “Daddy” and several others explore her conflicted relationship with her
father, Otto Plath, who died when she was age eight. In 1963, after this burst of
productivity, she took her own life.
SPINSTER
Plath had written this poem in 1956 — the year of her steamy first
encounter with the poet Ted Hughes, whom she would marry that same
year and who would become the father of her children.