Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair Through Poetry

Examines the failure of Sylvia Plath’s efforts to control her suicidal violence & to bridge her isolation from others via the shared affective experience of poetry. At first, she used traditional forms & mediated images, but when she abandoned them for a more personal expressive art, she lost the shaping, controlling devices she had been using for self-containment and self-repair. They were no longer available to her when she underwent a sweeping narcissistic regression after some stress.