Genre[edit]
"Lady Lazarus" and Sylvia Plath's poetry catalog falls under the literary genre of Confessional poetry.
According to the American poet and critic, Macha Rosenthal, Plath's poetry is confessional due to the way that she uses psychological shame and vulnerability, centers herself as the speaker, and represents the civilization she is living in.[1] Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, has characterized her poems as having strong autobiographical elements, as well.[1]
According to scholar Parvin Ghasemi, Lady Lazarus is written in "light verse containing the intense desire to die and be born; it is a poem of personal pain, suffering, and revenge".[2] Light verse, in this context, refers to a Plathian style of writing. Ghasemi addresses this, by quoting English poet Al Alvarez when he states, "her trick is to tell this horror story in a verse form as insistently jaunty and ritualistic as a nursery rhyme".[2] Writer Eileen M. Aird has said of Plath's writing style, "[i]t is clear that Sylvia Plath's description of 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' as 'light verse' is descriptive of a mode which contrives a highly sophisticated blend of the ironic and the violent".[3]
Omissions[edit]
When compared to early manuscripts and the audio recording, the published version omits several lines of verse. When Plath recorded this poem for the BBC in London in October 1962, her version included a line after line 12 of the published version, "Do I terrify?" The recorded version goes on, "Yes, yes, Herr Professor, it is I. Can you deny?" Another line of "I think I may be Japanese" follows line 33 of the published poem, "I may be skin and bone."[9][10]
References to the phoenix[edit]
The poem alludes to the mythological bird called the phoenix.[11] The speaker describes her attempts at committing suicide not as failures, but as successful resurrections, like those described in the tales of the biblical character Lazarus and the myth of the phoenix. By the end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a firebird, effectively marking her rebirth, which some critics liken to a demonic transformation.[12]