Talk:Daddy (poem)

message: would anyone object to me adding a link to the poem to the article? if so, feel free to remove it.
Is it really fair to say, "Plath is clearly suffering from the Electra complex" in this article? That seems kind of off to me.
I didn't know wikipedia was a place to place Critiques and interpretations of poetry.  Seems kinda counter-factual.  I dunno.  Silly article.  JudgeX 20:42, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I'm trying to make this article less like the ramblings of one opinion and more encclopedic.  its far from good, but maybe on the way to being better than it was before - the problem is a lot of it needs to be written from scratch and i'm not sure where to cite sources from, does anyone know of any good reliable sources RE Sylvia Plath? Percival500 (talk) 22:47, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: added some citations, still needs to be made NPOV though Percival500 (talk) 23:51, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

text: "She even goes as far to accuse him that he put his own religious beliefs before his family and his :health.  Seeing as how he had a treatable form of diabetes, he refused because allegedly it :interfered with his religious beliefs.  Because of his refusal of treatment it resulted in his death, :which Sylvia took personally (being 8), therefore she sees her father as a very cold person because :of his putting religion before family and health."
i wish people would stop analysing Daddy like a diary entry, and more like a poem.--Percival500 (talk) 12:20, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Rewrite

message: i cut this section form the page, way too informal and i doubt if any of it is legitimate and verifiable anyway.
:"She even goes as far to accuse him that he put his own religious beliefs before his family and his :health.  Seeing as how he had a treatable form of diabetes, he refused because allegedly it :interfered with his religious beliefs.  Because of his refusal of treatment it resulted in his death, :which Sylvia took personally (being 8), therefore she sees her father as a very cold person because :of his putting religion before family and health."
i wish people would stop analysing Daddy like a diary entry, and more like a poem.--Percival500 (talk) 12:20, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Religion

message: I rewrote the section of this article that dealt with the interpretation of this poem, adding citations from the analysis of literary scholars. I think that more could definitely be added to the article as long as it isn't an individual editor's POV.Jpcohen (talk) 22:27, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: As long as it is cited and properly attributed in the text, it is not POV. So I have restored Katie Roiphe's comments (as I noted in my edit summary, she has a doctorate in English literature so her opinion isn't just anybody's). Daniel Case (talk) 18:35, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wasn't accusing the Roiphe comments of being POV. But the criticism that I added is based on scholarly sources (which Slate is not). There are tons of critical analyses of "Daddy" and of Plath's poems (as a former English major, I'm sure you're aware of this). And none of them try to make the claim that "Daddy" is about Plath's mother. That's a pretty outrageous claim. All the critical texts that try to explain the biographical underpinnings of the text do so in terms of Plath's relationship with her father (for self-evident reasons--words like "Mother" or "Mommy" never appear in the text nor do any references to Plath's mother). So Roiphe's argument is a major stretch to say the least. And it falls far outside of the mainstream critical literature on the poem. So giving Roiphe's short Slate commentary almost half of the "Interpretation" Section gives it undue weight at the very least. There are much more definitive, well-supported critical interpretations of "Daddy" out there that I think deserve more respect that Roiphe's (regardless of her academic credentials, she was writing on Slate as a journalist and not a literary scholar). Do you know of any literary scholar who has made the same or a similar argument as Roiphe? If so, I would say okay. But if she's the only one, then I think it should go.Jpcohen (talk) 04:40, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redid Interpretation Section 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: There has been some suggestion (see article by Glenn Sheldon & others) that she may have been sexually abused by Otto Plath, which would go a long way to explaining the evident rage in the poem, certain lines ("the villagers always knew it was you", etc)  as well as later bouts of self-harm and eventual suicide. In fact, many aspects of her life are textbook responses to severe childhood trauma.
This makes some sense, given that the poem is written through the lens of a mature Plath, based on just the eight years she knew her father. There could be few other events in so short a contact timeframe likely to incite this level of clear dislike. Not sure if it's worth exploring, or how many reliable sources are out there regarding this. Hanoi Road (talk) 13:46, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Childhood Trauma?