Daddy

“Daddy” fits within the confessional poetry movement of 1950s-1960s America ushered in by poet Robert Lowell and his poetry collection Life Studies, which tackles his time in a mental hospital. In a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, later printed in The Poet Speaks, Plath described Lowell’s work as “this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo.” As a way to deal with his own mental health issues, Lowell began to teach the confessional style in poetry courses at Boston University. Participants included Anne Sexton and Plath, who began to incorporate confessional poetry elements in Ariel, her collection of poems before her death.

As with other confessional poems, “Daddy” utilizes a first-person narrative and focuses on extreme emotion or trauma. She compares her relationship with her father to one of the most horrific 20th century occurrences, the Holocaust. The poem also tackles traditionally taboo subjects like suicide and mental illness, a common feature of many confessional poems. The female poets associated with this movement, including Plath and Sexton, also countered the glorification of the suburban housewife happening at the time, which Betty Friedan wrote about in 1963’s The Feminine Mystique. Sexton writes openly about affairs in Love Poems while Plath addresses in “Daddy” how living with her husband can seem just as oppressive as living with her father.

“Daddy” has had lasting influence. It is an oft-recited poem, e.g., musician/actor Courtney Love’s audition for the Mickey Mouse Club in 1977. Critic George Steiner said “Daddy” is “the Guernica of modern poetry,” comparing the poem’s magnitude and influence to Pablo Picasso’s famous oil painting, hailed as one of his best.