death, have not been fully considered by many critics. Her recognition should certainly place her among the most significant female poets of the twentieth century. Plath's success was definitly posthumous. Ironically, many of her popular poems share a common thread -- a theme that deals with death, the dead, and dying. However, death featured in her work as both a theme and a device must be treated as more than a mere fixation. She saw death as a treatment and a process in her poems. Her view of death was from her personal experiences of failed suicide attempts, a sort of trial death for her. Frank Magill's analysis of Plath's death-themed poems offer an insight, "It could be said that Plath's basic subject is the art of dying." (1628) In addition, "Plath's strongest poems invoke archetypal figures and stories in a way that re-energizes early childhood images of the evil parent, the human sacrifice, and all forms of death-bringers." (1630) In one of her more popular poems, "Daddy", she addresses her dead father, she proceeds to exorcise him, banish him from herself, telling him that she is through with him. Also her poem, "Lady Lazarus", which was writen around the time of "Daddy", deals with death, but this time it is her own. In "Lady Lazarus" she dies many deaths, commenting on how she "does it well". She continues to rise again, having a number of lives to use up simply to die. "Throughout her career, Plath worked with a tightly connected cluster of concerns -- metamorphosis, rebirth, the self as threatened by death, the otherness of the natural world, fertility and sterility -- and applied them all to what she was as the central situation of her life, the death of her father, and the complex emotions of loss, guilt and resentment it aroused in her even as an adult." (Katha Pollitt, 342) During Plath's most productive month, October 1962, she wrote a letter to her mother saying, " I am a genius of a writer; I have it in ...
