Sylvia Plath's Daddy

[Gorki]

Hello folks
Could anybody help me deconstructing Plath's Daddy? What interpretations do you derive out of the poem? Any background info on the poem's context would surely help.
Thanks.

[MorpheusSandman]

It's basically Plath writing about her abusive father with a great density of language and sound. I've never been a big fan of the confessional poets, but I can enjoy that piece just for the sound.

[OrphanPip]

On one level it is Plath talking about her "abusive" father, but it is also a practice in constructing the poetic self. The speaker of "Daddy" is simultaneously Plath and a depersonalized subjectivity constructed out of the experiences of others. The poem only obliquely refers to the autobiographical details of Plath's relationship to her father (you get a mention of him having been a teacher), but most of it is constructed out of references to the experiences of others, her subjectivity is both a personal and a collective one.

This is the basic conceit of "Confessional" poetry, that the relationship between the autobiographical self and the speaker is neither a complete identification (in some form of sincere self-expression, like you get in a high school love poem) nor is it the modernist ideal of depersonalization. The point being to highlight the way both art/social context and the personal experience contribute to the construction of self. Elizabeth Bishop does this a lot better than Plath.