| Sylvia Plath is a famous American confessional poet in the 20 th century,and she is also the winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Her poems are praised for their strange images and straightforward emotions.The Collected Poems compiled by Ted Hughes contains 224 poems of Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her death,as well as50 poems from Juvenilia,which almost cover the creation of Plath‘s whole life.Previous studies of Plath‘s poetry mainly focus on the study of confessional poetry,psychoanalysis,feminism,and the themes of death.This thesis takes The Collected Poems as the research object,applying the existential psychology and anxiety theory of American humanistic psychologist Rollo May to analyze the existential anxiety in Plath‘s poetry.This thesis demonstrates the existential anxiety embodied in Plath‘s poetry from the following three aspects.First of all,this paper holds that in Sylvia Plath‘s poems,neither the natural environment nor the social environment where people live has provided a suitable living space for human beings,which leads to anxiety.On the one hand,human beings are wantonly destroying the nature;on the other hand,nature is also ruthlessly retaliating against the mankind.This hurtful relationship between nature and human beings reflects the poet‘s uneasiness and anxiety.In terms of social environment,it can be believed that the existence anxiety of the poet through the description of the plight of females‘ survival and the trauma experience brought by wars.Moreover,the lack of fatherly love,the manipulation of the dominant maternal love,the persistence of precarious love and the deconstruction of the traditional mother-child relationship reflected in the poem prove that the tense relationship between people threatens the existence value or certainty of the individual whether in the family relationship or in the marriage relationship,which results in anxiety.Finally,there is the anxiety of the conscious world embodied in the poetry.This anxiety is manifested in the following aspects: the vague recognition of self-identity,the construction of the duality of self-identity,the useless struggle against various authorities and the complete self-denial.And this complete self-denial is the final result of existential anxiety.Through the above analysis,this paper points out that Plath‘s poetry is full of anxiety,which is the epitome of the poet‘s sad life,as well as the poet‘s philosophical thinking of human society. |
