Poetics of Neurosis: A Study of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Pankaj Bhattacharjee*

Abstract

This article is a study of one of the most brilliant and successful American poets
Sylvia Plath’s neurotic poetry. As a member of confessional school of poetry her
poems are extremely personal yet superbly refined. She was a serious patient of
neurosis. Consequently a question arises whether her confession precedes neurosis
or her suffered neurosis compels her to be confessional. Neurotic or at some
extreme points schizophrenic expressions in poetry do not usually reach the
desirable level of poetics. But, it is interesting to observe that Sylvia Plath’s neurotic
spells, one after another, have transformed poetry of neurosis into poetics of
neurosis. Through an analysis of Plath’s history of neurosis and her poetry this
article will finally show how she has been able to make a rare symbiosis of
psychological strains of life and beauty of poetry.

Sylvia Plath is one of the most promising, celebrated and significant literary
voices to have emerged from America in modern era. Like her predecessors Robert
Lowell, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton she is seen as an
exceptional confessional poet of her time. Plath lived a short life (1931-1963) but
produced great works like Colossus, The Bell Jar, Ariel etc. Plath’s poetry and prose
works reveal what she experienced in her life. Throughout her short poetic career
she desperately channeled out her feelings by writing poetry, mixing her personal
life, psychic strivings and historical predicament rooted in her German- Jewish
ancestry. In Anne Sexton’s words, “. . . Sylvia was determined from childhood to
be great, a great writer at the least of it” (qtd. in Wagner, 30). The inextricable
relationship between her life and her work often overlap each other. Like Keats she
experienced her own version of “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” of life, and
longed for death more than ever in a rather far more brutal way (“Nightingale” 23).
The struggles of her life along with the schizophrenic attacks taught her what every
human being desires for. She, like Shelly, looked “before and after” and pined “for
what is not” (“Skylark” 87). Search for love, roots and self-identity did not allow
her a life of happiness. Whoever she turned to for love and warmth rewarded her
with immense pain and sometimes betrayal. The only way she managed to ventilate
her loss, grief and love was through writing poetry. P. Rajani comments: “In her
poetry, the destructive forces of life are countered by the creative forces of art. It
helped her retain a hold over herself, especially during periods of depression and
emotional and spiritual turmoil” (4). The most productive poetic period of her life
was marked by some intense episodes of depression and psychological disorders.
Her poetry is, thus, immensely influenced by her mental instability. Her deep rooted

∗ Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Metropolitan University, Sylhet, Bangladesh

46 Metropolitan University Journal

neurosis accelerated her creativity as a poet constructively and produced a rare
synthesis of neurosis and poetics.

Poetics and Neurosis: An Overview

Poetics encompasses every aspect of the creation of poetry, such as poet himself or
herself, the technique of writing poem, emotion, poetic diction, aesthetics etc.. The
term poetics has its origin in Greek adjective “poietikos, related to the noun poietes,
‘maker’ or ‘poet’” (The Penguin, 300). According to Aristotle poetics is “the art of
poetry” and he included in its range “various kinds of poetry and their characteristic
functions” (Poetics 31). Aristotle further defined all forms of poetry as “forms of
imitation or representation” (Poetics 31). He viewed poetics as an “integral part of
Mimesis” that means imitation of reality (Macey 300). However, modern theories
of poetics have gone far away detailing and encompassing different aspects of
literariness. According to Todorov poetics:

... is not concerned with literature or poetry, and less still is it

concerned with the critical evaluation of texts on a scale of ‘good’ and
‘bad,’ but with their ‘poeticity’ or ‘literariness’. Its object consists of
the properties of literary discourse as such, and particular works are
exemplars of those properties. (qtd. in Macey 301).

One of the most vivid notions of poetics is given by Barthes where he recognizes
poetics as “a hypothetical descriptive model which allows the analysis of how
literary works are constructed” (qtd in Penguin 301). He further says that poetics
“describes how meanings are generated by the text and how and why they are
accepted as meaningful by readers” (qtd. in Macey 301). So it may well be said that
poetics as a term deals with the aesthetics and mechanics of literary writing of prose
and poetry. It mainly focuses on the text detailing its acceptability and features
which make a literary piece time conquering.

As a general word neurosis refers to disequilibrium of human psyche which is

disturbing both to the person suffering and the people living around him or her. It is
a kind of mental or emotional disorder involving symptoms such as insecurity,
anxiety, depression and irrational fears. A neurotic person does have extremely
obsessional thoughts and often does compulsive acts. Today’s psychoanalysis
“describes patients presenting obsessional, phobic or hysterical symptoms as
neurotic” (Macey, 268). “In traditional psychiatry” according to Taber’s Cyclopedic
Medical Dictionary, neurosis is “an unconscious conflict that produces anxiety and
other symptoms and leads to maladaptive use of defense mechanism” (1463).

Sylvia Plath’s History of Neurosis

Plath’s neurosis compels us to look back on her personal life. Her psychological
pangs were deeply rooted in the occurrences of her personal life such as her father’s

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death, suicide attempts, her German-Jewish ancestry, and her unsuccessful conjugal
life with Ted Hughes. Plath suffered mental breakdown several times in her life. In
one sense her whole life looped around some dreadful mental breakdowns which
finally resulted in a premature suicide at the age of thirty. Neurosis had been a latent
psychological problem within her since her childhood which started surfacing with
her father’s death. Plath’s mother, Mrs. Aurelia Schober Plath, accounted in Letters
Home how the news of Mr. Otto Plath’s death plunged the young Sylvia into a world
of despair. Learning the news Plath reacted violently, and told her mother, “I’ll
never speak to God again!” (25). Her father was the central figure in the family as
well as in Plath’s life. Plath had the desire to please her father because he paid less
attention to her. In this regard Hayman states that, “Though her father wasn’t
particularly fond of young children ... assuming she must be at fault if he was less
interested in her, she exerted herself more in the activities which seemed to please
him; making up little rhymes, dancing, drawing, playing the piano for him” (qtd in
Nedoma 12). So it is evident from the comment that Plath was focused on fulfilling
her obligations that might please her father. But the death of her father devastated
all her efforts of gaining father’s attention and love. The absence of her father
completely left her directionless and scared of real life. Jeannette Nedoma goes on
clarifying her father’s death as one of the greatest traumas of her life: “After his
death Sylvia had no chance to take a turn for the better. The lack of father is surely
the cause for her later neuroses. ... To lose a parent is the worst that can to a child
or teenager and it causes unamendable problems in later life. In Plath’s life the lack
of a parent is reflected in the longing for male love” (12).

It took a long time for Plath to recover from the shock of her father’s death.
Gradually she gained her normal life. Except father she had everything that could
make her happy. Plath was brilliant, talented and beautiful. She was an aspiring
writer. She attended Smith College on scholarship and won a guest editorship at
Mademoiselle in New York City in the summer of 1953. However, her experiences
at Smith had not quite been sweet. Later that summer, Sylvia attempted suicide by
taking a large number of sleeping pills learning the news that she had not been
admitted to the Harvard Summer Writing Program which she had applied for. She
was treated for depression at McLean Hospital with traumatic psychotherapy. Her
neurosis started developing from that event which preceded the later depressions.
Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar deals with her experience at Smith College.
The novel is fully autobiographical which closely details the events of Plath’s life.

However, Plath returned to Smith the next spring, wrote her honours thesis on
the double in Dostoevsky (“The Magic Mirror”), and graduated summa cum laude
in 1955, with a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge
(Kirk, Sylvia). Plath shifted from America to England to launch a special phase of
her life. There she met Ted Hughes, the young and attractive British poet. Both of
them were deeply in love with each other and got married in the same year they met.
According to Mrs. Plath these years were “the most exciting and colorful of Sylvia’s
life” (qtd in Marsack, 5). Plath and Hughes were both accomplished poets. Initially

48 Metropolitan University Journal

the handsome and perfect couple led a happy conjugal life. After a period of poetic
and professional adjustment in England they sailed to the USA only to find their
relation deteriorated day by day. By this time Plath had two children. The events
were followed by the betrayal of Hughes who developed an extra-marital
relationship with a woman named Assia. Consequently the poet couple got divorced
in 1962 and Plath plunged into immense despair which lasted till her death.

Poetics of Neurosis:
Plath’s poetry demands our attention to be read as a whole. Individual poems are
best understood while they are read keeping in view the context of her oeuvre. Two
most important facets of reading Plath’s poetry are her neurosis and her confessional
mode of writing. Sylvia Plath belongs to the confessional school of poetry initiated
by a number of poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Robert Lowell,
Philip Roth, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton. The
confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that
previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private experiences,
feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in this
type of poetry often in an autobiographical manner. Plath in particular was
interested in the psychological aspect of poetry. “Confessional poetry” as Denise
Levertov remarks:

... means not just poetry with autobiographical elements clearly

present in it but poetry which utilizes the poem as a place in which to
confess parts of one’s life which are troublesome—the kinds of things
which require the act of confession.(97)

Some influential readings of Plath’s work by Al Avarez, M. L. Rosenthel and others

established the tendency to read her poetry as confessional: “as an extremist art
characterized by ‘compulsive intensity’, authenticity of voice , and transparence of
language” (qtd. in Gill 116). Reading Plath as a confessional poet “gives us
unmediated access to the troubled mind of the poet” (Gill 116).

Now, the question arises whether Sylvia Plath’s confession preceded neurosis or
her neurosis compelled her to be confessional. Furthermore, it is quite natural that
one can be confessional without being neurotic and vice-versa. When someone,
especially a poet or writer, writes something in a confessional mode out of his or her
neurotic disorder, it does not always reach the height of poetics. Neurotic or
confessional expression is, almost always bizarre, incoherent and to a certain extent
compartmentalized. A patient suffering from such mental ordeals remains incapable
of bearing events like failure and trauma in any sphere of his or her life. Any such
event may lead him or her towards self-destruction. This is what exactly happened
with Sylvia Plath time and again. She also chose the path of self-destruction by
committing suicide at a premature age. Before doing so she left behind a collection
of stunning poetry which transforms sufferings into poetry and bleeding into poetics.

Metropolitan University Journal 49

 Most of Plath’s famous poems have been derived from some severe psychological
complexities which she has encountered in her life. In her own words her poems:

. . . immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I

have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart
that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.
I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences,
even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of
experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with
an informed and intelligent mind. (qtd in M. D. Uroff, 1)

Based on her personal experiences Plath has produced the most disturbing poetry
of her time. She tore apart her emotions and experiences into various facades, went
deep inside to excavate the fiends that plagued her throughout– the death of her
father; identifying herself as a Jew being the daughter of a German-Jew parents; her
own self-defeating perfectionism that would not allow her to accept her failures; her
relationship with her husband, Ted Hughes, and his adulterous affair and rejection;
her inability to control the world around her; and most importantly her mental
suffocation and illness. What matters about all these episodes of her life is that she
could not keep them aloof from her poetic creed. Rather they make a strange
synthesis of disorder and order—neurosis and poetry as we will see in the following
study of some of her very crucial poems.

The poem “Daddy” reveals Plath’s love for her father in an obsessive way. Plath
herself comments on the poem that it is uttered “by a girl suffering from Electra
Complex” (qtd in Raichura 79). The way she frantically treats her love and hate
relationship with her father and the historical guilt of inheriting a Nazi-Jewish lineage
in “Daddy” suggests a neurotic dimension of an otherwise filial love. She opens the
poem with the fact that her father is no more in a pathetically unornamental statement:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (1-5)

What strikes the reader is the symbol of shoe. The black shoe, a symbol, a
memorabilia is left behind. The poet has fitted her life and existence within the space
of a shoe and she has been living there for thirty years which is a long stretch of time
to live and grow under the imposing personality of a German father. This gloomy
German personality of Sylvia Plath has made her one with the ramifications of the War.

Plath lived her whole life under the overbearing shadow of her father and it was
a suffocation for her: “For thirty years, poor and white,/ Barely daring to breathe or
Achoo” (4-5). As a patient of neurosis she wants to kill her father: “Daddy, I have

50 Metropolitan University Journal

had to kill you./ You died before I had time” (6-7). These lines show how troubled
she felt because of the sudden death of her father. This is not a commonplace
statement of anger or grief. She has a burning heart inside her. She can feel the
absence of her father. She deplores that her father is not there to talk to her: “I never
could talk to you” (24). She had only eight years of her life to live with him and the
memory she had was of an imposing and fearful father. This personal fear of the
poet towards her father is nicely expressed in the following lines of the poem:

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You---- (41-45)

This is the fear which initiated and accelerated the symptoms of neurosis in Plath.
This fear is the demon which made Plath’s father a devilish Nazi character to her.

We find Plath wriggling with her historical predicaments in this poem especially
with those deriving from her German – Jewish ancestry. The essential conflict with
her Jewish inheritance from her mother’s side and German guilt from her father’s
side aggravate the situation and she therefore thinks that she could “well be a Jew”
(“Daddy” 35). The conflict of her split self gives birth to a series of ambivalences
in her life. Her existence is grievously questioned by her ambivalences. Vic Olvir
writes: “This, then, was the central feature of Sylvia’s existence: being German was
a thing of shame; it was to carry a blood guilt that somehow must be expiated” (5).
“Daddy”, like most of her poems, grows within the premise of identity crisis and
historical guilt referred earlier. Her divided self compelled her to see things in terms
of races, nations and politics. During the last few years of her life, Sylvia Plath became
increasingly interested in history and politics. As a result references to Nazism,
concentration camp, Holocaust imagery and the hangover of the World War II became
very common in her poetry.

Plath’s neurosis puts her poetic sensibility to a test when she says, “I thought
every German was you” (29). Putting her father in the role of Hitler she starts
thinking like a Jew and envisages the inhuman deeds committed by those Nazis in
those concentration camps:

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew. (31-35)

The extent she has been obsessed by warfare and her personal losses is clearly
evident in her reference to the notorious concentration camps ‘Dachau, Auscwitz,

Metropolitan University Journal 51

Belsen’ and her hallucinatory identification with the atrocities. Her psychological
complexity compels her to identify her father among the Nazis whereas she herself
imagines her as a Jew of “weird luck” (38). In this poem Plath’s misleading identities
of her father and her own create a big confusion among the readers and the critics.
What she identifies as ‘weird luck’ similar to those of the Jews in World War II,
however, demeans the actual oppression experienced by the real victims. Her ‘weird
luck’ stems from her very self-induced guilt and unintended neurosis but what the
Jews experienced was a real, not imagined, holocaust. She associates her father with
the crime he never committed by calling him, ‘panzer-man.’ This association is
horrific to those who experienced the atrocity of war. A daughter’s admission, rather
invention, of her father being a panzer man is absolutely shocking. Identifying her
father as a Nazi-German and she as a Jew of ‘weird luck’ are vivid manifestations of
her neurotic bend of mind. The appropriateness of her aligning Nazism with her
father has been, however, questioned by critics. It is to be noted that Otto Plath
migrated to America in 1900 and he died in 1940. The World War II began in 1939
when Plath was only seven years old and Otto Plath was wriggling on his death-bed.
So neither the father nor the daughter could have any role to play in the Nazi
holocaust. Leon Wieseltier concurs with the pain felt by Plath in this poem but goes
further blaming her for inappropriate juxtaposition of holocaust imagery in the poem:

There can be no disputing the genuineness of the pain here. But the Jews with
whom she identifies were victims of something worse than ‘weird luck.’
Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to
the Jews. The metaphor is inappropriate. (qtd in Harold Bloom, 22)

This remark of Leon, however, does not demean the greatness of the poem. George
Steiner has applauded “Daddy” in the highest term. “ It is the ‘Guernica’ of modern
poetry. And it is both histrionic and in some ways ‘arty’, as is Picasso’s outcry”
(qtd.in Marsack 51).

In many other poems of Sylvia Plath, Holocaust imagery has been used to convey
different themes. This historical event in Plath’s poetry is one of the factors that has
made her poems so great. She uses the sufferings of the Jews during the holocaust
as an analogy for her own plight and it has been exemplified in her another seminal
poem “Lady Lazarus”. Right from the beginning the poem reveals Plath’s
juxtaposition of genius and dismaying image of Holocaust:

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight, (4-7)

The effect is shocking. Lazarus is a Biblical male figure but in this poem the
character is given a female shape with a Jewish identity. The references to Nazi
lampshades which were supposedly made from the skin of murdered Jews and so

52 Metropolitan University Journal

the paperweights from their bones reveal the brutal picture of holocaust. Plath
compares her own suffering to being skinned alive. After she is burnt in a
crematorium all that left is “Ash, ash” and “Flesh, bone, there is nothing
there”(72,74) The remaining of her body will produce, perhaps: “A cake of soap,/
A wedding ring,/ A gold filling” (75-77). These lines bring forth a horrible truth of
Nazi atrocity. During the War they used to burn the Jews in the concentration camps
and from their gold teeth made valuable ingots. Plath then proceeds identifying
herself with the Jews and becomes an “opus” to a “Doktor” in the concentration
camp. In a mocking vein she adores the concerns of “Herr Doktor” for her: “Do not
think I underestimate your great concern” (72). “Ironically,” as Raichura says,
“there is no genuine ‘concern’ for the victim, either in ‘Herr Doktors’ or ‘the peanut
crunching crowd’: the concern (interest, care or feeling for) of these is with their
own concern” (71). A new myth then emerges out of Plath’s attachment with Nazi
atrocity and hatred relating to that of the mythical bird phoenix. The Nazis who she
addresses as “Herr Lucifer” are to be eaten up by the red haired Lady Lazarus:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air (81-3)

Incorporating the Holocaust imagery in this poem Plath finally envisages the resurrection
of an avenging female who has the capacity to put an end to all the atrocities.

One of the most important episodes that compounded Sylvia Plath’s neurosis is her
love, marriage and consequent separation with Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath’s conjugal
life with the famous British poet Ted Hughes proved disastrous; they lived together
for eight years and had two children. Though their relationship started happily it
resulted in a premature divorce as a consequence of the betrayal of Ted. In the poem
“Lesbos” Plath pen pictured the bitter experiences of her conjugal life as well the
tremendous psychological shock she got due to the separation. The poem, an amazing
lament of broken dreams, combines words and senses, tragedy and aesthetics of
suffering and entrapment. The life of the poet has turned hellish. Even the children
offer no joy. Referring to Ted, she says that her daughter is “The bastard’s girl” (16).
She cannot be free; she has two children to attend to: “I should wear tiger pants, I
should have an affair./ We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,/ Me and
you” (29-32). Plath has tried to keep away her husband away from Assia, the mistress
of Ted Hughes for whom he divorced Plath, but the effort went in vein. Plath gives
vent to her abomination and anger towards that lady in an untoward sentence: “Every
woman's a whore” (70). To Plath, Ted was a vampire who drank her blood for ‘seven
years’ (“Daddy” 74); Like Otto Plath he has seriously unsettled her mental
equilibrium and forced a relapse to chronic schizophrenic disorders.

One of the most fatal consequences of neurosis in Plath was her tendency of
committing suicide. The obsession for death was so great in her self that it finally
won over everything and ended her life only at the age of thirty. During the short

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span of her life she attempted suicide three times and succeeded in the last one at
the age of thirty. The first time she tried to commit suicide at the age of twenty. She
endeavored to link this failed attempt of committing suicide with her desire to get
united with her father in the world hereafter: “At twenty I tried to die/ And get back,
back, back to you./ I thought even the bones would do” (“Daddy” 58-60).

Finally she succeeds in committing suicide. In “Edge” we see how she preplans
her suicide and does it with a “smile of accomplishment”:

The woman is perfected.

Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity (1-4)

She completed all her tasks before she reached the edge. The poem also refers to her
two children Nicholas and Frieda. The children are imagined as serpents whom she
feeds with milk: “Each dead child coiled, a white serpent” (9). This line directly
refers to her last day of life. Before committing suicide, she prepared milk and
breakfast for her children who were sleeping then. The image then shifts to the
empty pitcher of milk implying that the mother is no more to feed the baby. This is
the real thing that happened with Sylvia Plath. There was no one to look after her
children after her death. “Edge” superbly transforms an anticipated ritual of death
into a fine piece of poetry. As her last poem before her suicide, it foreshadows her
death with a tragic hangover. She is no longer able to fight with the demons or
dilemmas of her life; she has reached a state of total nihilism. Plath, like a beloved,
longed for her lover death throughout her whole life and finally meets it at the age
of thirty. The wonderful serenity about the envisaged drama, the snapshots of a
troubled life and the pathos centering on Frieda and Nicholas-all reach the
destination, that is death, she had longed for.

“Lady Lazarus”, which is a mosaic of myth and personal experiences of the poet,
reveals the most startling of her death wishes. The poem was written just half a year
before she committed suicide. The opening of the poem is, indeed, very much
shocking. The poet reveals her time and again attempts to commit suicide: I have
done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it---” (1-3). She is implying that
suicide attempts have plagued her at age ten, twenty, and thirty. However, in real
life, Sylvia Plath did not attempt suicide at the age of ten, but we are able to deduce
the fact that her father died when Plath was eight or nine years old. This could
possibly relate to suicide, because her soul died, and her father's death haunted and
upset her throughout her life. Plath considered herself as “walking miracle,” after
being brought back to life after those attempts. Admitting herself as a miracle is an
extreme form of confession. It is only possible by someone suffering from severe
mental disorder. Plath wrote this poem in such a state of mind. The sixth stanza of
“Lady Lazarus” speaks of Plath's second suicide attempt, which left Plath almost
paralyzed - mentally, emotionally, and physically: “Soon, soon the flesh / The grave

54 Metropolitan University Journal

cave ate will be / At home on me” (16-18). In 1953, after returning from McLean
psychiatric hospital in Boston, Plath attempted suicide for the second time in her
life, by overdosing on an antidepressants and then hiding in the crawl space. The
crawl space was “the cave.” She goes on uttering that “like the cat” she has “nine
times to die” and “This is number three” (21-22). This type of utterance is possible
when human brain loses reasoning, coherence, and rationality.
To a patient suffering from schizophrenia death is not real but a sort of fantasy.
In Plath’s case the same thing happens as she plays with death both in her real life
and in her poetry. She takes away death in the height of art; to her, death is
instinctive and easy:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell. (“Lady Lazarus” 43-46)

This is the final surrender to death. On Monday 11th February, 1963 Plath was
found in the kitchen, lying with her head on a cloth in the gas oven, all the gas taps
on full. She was given artificial respiration but it was too late, she was dead. All her
pangs, thus, ended with the death.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing. (“Colossus” 29-31)

There is no denying the fact that Sylvia Plath was a typical neurotic patient.
Still, her poems show the intense breakthrough into a world of extremely personal
and emotional experiences that are usually for bidden to express. A close study of
her poems, however, reveals that her poetry goes beyond all the categorizations and
has a voice uniquely of her own. It will only be a partial truth to say that whatever
she has written is, however, a by-product or symbiosis of her depression and
poetics. What strikes her readers most is her hypnotic power to attract them towards
her poetry. It will be a little exaggeration to say that in the last phase of her life she
has been able to turn her poetics in the height of philosophy. Whatever she uttered
in a neurotic vein they seem to echo to her reader as philosophy of life.

Being a serious patient of neurosis Sylvia Plath leaves all possible traces of a
neurotic in her poetry. She is seen extremely emotional in the delineation of her loss,
grief, agony, anguish, suffering, joy, love and all other human feelings of life. Her
way of expressing all these emotions is, at the same time, very strange. But what she
says, she says with style, elegance and art. She possesses all the innate qualities of
a good poet. She does not let go her neurotic outburst unheard or uncared. She time
and again compels us to take her poetry with all seriousness and thus her neurotic
poetry reaches the height of poetics. As a competent artist she has been able to make
a rare symbiosis of the pains of her life and beauty of poetry.

Metropolitan University Journal 55

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