The Nuclear Holocaust: Sylvia Plath as a Mother Poet

Sylvia Plath is a kind of poet whose personal experience enlarges to the larger historical one. We can find it in her invocation of historical tragedies such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Plath uses these tragedies to reveal her anxieties under the pressure of the Cold War. In this paper, I write about her reference to the Holocaust in light of the specter of nuclear war. Plath produced a variety of poems in the last quarter of 1962. In October especially, in the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis which occurred at the height of the Cold War, she created 25 poems, which were later called the “October Poems”. It seems that her dominated anxieties triggered her to write a host of poems. This time I focus on Plath’s mother-child related poems. Her anxieties about the effects of nuclear bombs were directly connected to her children.