Yuhan Xie

To fully comprehend poetry, readers want objective instruments for attentive reading. This paper offers a close reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” a poem written three months before her ‌self-destruction and regarded as Plath’s masterpiece. In a discussion that takes its cue from Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature, I endeavor to analyze the singularity of Plath’s “daddy” mainly from three aspects, including the distinctive combination, singular words and phrases, and the usage of metaphor. More broadly, focusing on the singularity of poems like “daddy,” we can see the importance of literary aesthetics and the author’s unique imagination and experience.

singularity; Sylvia Plath; Derek Attridge; The Singularity of Literature

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