Daddy (poem)
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Daddy is a poem by Sylvia Plath. It is one of Plath's best-known poems, in part because of its vivid, sometimes brutal imagery. Daddy is perhaps in large part inspired by the early death of Plath's father, a few weeks prior to the poet's eighth birthday. The poem describes Plath's deep bitterness concerning the death of her father and her unresolved feelings toward him, with hints of her troubled relationship with the poet Ted Hughes. Daddy was posthumously published in Ariel in 1965.
More recent criticism has tended to focus on subtleties in the poem overlooked by early readers who saw it in strictly autobiographical terms. For example, when Plath makes her apparent self-comparison with the Jews, the metaphor in fact depends on the word 'language' ('and the language obscene, an engine, an engine, chuffing me off like a Jew'), as Jacqueline Rose has pointed out. A metaphor 'one of whose halves is language' cannot be treated as banal self-aggrandisement, but might be seen as a way of thinking about the individual's relationship to events like the Holocaust, rightly so fixed in the collective imagination that they amount to a kind of absolute.

