Plath sylvia dialogue between doctor

Plath Profiles 135 Medical Imagery in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath Ralph Didlake, M.D. Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities The University of Mississippi Medical Center Powerful imagery is a hallmark of Sylvia Plath’s poetry.

Carefully-wrought and strongly evocative images of mythologic figures, of the sea, of mirrors, and of faces are found throughout her verse and have been well-discussed in the extensive body of literature that covers her work.

Somewhat less well-discussed is her use of poetic imagery derived from illness, from medical environments, and from anatomic pathology. The relative lack of analysis of these medical images, as a group, becomes quite conspicuous when one considers the frequency with which such images occur across the spectrum of her poetry.

Beginning with a selection from her juvenilia, the poem “Morning in the Hospital Solarium,” written when she was only in her late teens, quite accurately describes the