Plath's Spanish poems and tropes

Turning landscape into mindscape

Authors

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2018/2/312671
Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Spain, culture shock, poetic development, imagery, landscape and mindscape.

Abstract

Although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer’s evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath’s response to the alien setting that are analyzed in this paper. The corpus of “Spanish poems” and its most salient motifs will be identified and examined to assess the emotional and artistic response of Plath’s encounter with Spain in her work. A rhetorical analysis of these poems will be carried out but biographical data from Plath’s journals, correspondence and prose will also be considered. Finally, two later poems will be examined to demonstrate that Spain left its imprint in Plath’s mind, supplying suggestive imagery which turned the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.

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Author Biography

María Luisa Pascual Garrido, University of Cordoba (Spain)

Department of English and German Studies

Lecturer

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Published
28-12-2018
How to Cite
Pascual Garrido, M. L. (2018). Plath’s Spanish poems and tropes: Turning landscape into mindscape. International Journal of English Studies, 18(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2018/2/312671
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Articles