Sylvia Plath has never directly stated that her poem “Daddy” is about her father, Otto Plath. In fact, in the months before her suicide, Plath had described the poem as being about, "a girl with an Electra complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God. Her case is...

The best works of literature are those which present the reader with more than one interpretation. Often, they have more than one layer, one which stands out as obvious to the reader and one which can only be found at a deeper level. Many of Robert Frost’s poetry is like...

While politicians argue at the pulpit over which laws and policies are best for their respective countries, or their own pocketbooks, poets and artists have been writing about utopian possibilities for centuries. William Blake, born in a time when religion had an even greater grasp on societal views than now,...

Thomas Hardy’s The Ruined Maid is a poem consisting of an imagined dialogue between two working class women, one of whom, ‘Melia, has transformed herself into an apparently wealthy, sophisticated lady. In the time since the two last met, it is heavily implied ‘Melia has become a “kept” woman, a...

Poetry of Departures is a lyric poem by the famous Philip Larkin. Just as many other Larkin’s poems, Poetry of Departures contains some implications for fatalism, irreversibility, and loss. The poem is based on an opposition between two different concepts: a familiar and stable life and a new, reformed life....