Maudlin - Sylvia Plath Revision Guide

Student Revision Guide
This Revision Guide offers 7 clear sections: Overview; Form and Structure; Close Analysis; Key Themes; Context; Critical Perspectives; Study Questions and Extension Activities.
The Close Analysis section works quatrain by quatrain through a dense, compressed early poem, taking its images one at a time rather than forcing a single story upon them. Form and Structure examines the compression of the quatrains and the pressure it places on every image. Context covers the poem’s place in Crossing the Water (1971) and in the development of Plath’s style. Critical Perspectives sets two readings side by side: the poem as a birth scene, and the poem as an example of Plath’s early, heavily worked manner.

Quotation Quilt
A selection of key quotations from ‘Maudlin’, arranged to support the themes and concepts an essay on this poem is most likely to need.
Quotations are grouped by the poem’s key images, taken phrase by phrase; the faggot-bearing figure; the evidence for reading the poem as a birth scene; and the evidence for reading it as an exercise in Plath’s early style, so that students can test both readings against the same lines.