Works: We can divide works by Sylvia Plath into 3 groups :

Journals: Plath was 11 when she started to write a diary, and kept journals until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath.In 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath with the help of her husband Ted Hughes..

Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."

Poems: Plath has been criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust,^[15] and is known for her uncanny use of metaphor.

In 1960, while in London, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell. In poems "Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" there are potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness.

Characteristics of conceptual poets that she embodied included her ability to start and finish a poem in a day. Another was her focus on emotion rather than observation, as she piled up metaphors that dramatized her surreally imaginative world.

In 1982 Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems.

Mad girl's love song

The metaphorical title presents the lens through a mad person's view of not only her relationship with her lover also the rest of the surrounding world. a relationship with a man that she thinks is so great that she says "I think I made you up inside my head". In her life Plat was married, however they separated, which could have inspired her to write a poem about a man from dreams.

It shows also a feeling of broken love with frustration and insanity. the poem provides insight into Plath's own battle with depression. This poem has a total of 6 stanzas; the first stanza begins with two lines that represent Plath's depressing attitude, "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”.

She is repeating only 2 rhymes, it is called VILLANELLE. These rhymes are probably used to emphasize the obsession of imaginary love.

A1  (refrain)
b
A2 (refrain)

a
b
A1 (refrain)

a
b
A2 (refrain)

a
b
A1 (refrain)

a
b
A2 (refrain)

a
b
A1
A2 (refrain)

A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain.

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