28. Her complicated relationship with her father has long fascinated Plath scholars; did she love ‘Daddy’ or fear him?
Her father’s death hit young Sylvia hard. Later, she would write that the 9 years of her life up until that point “sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying moth”. Otto’s passing would inspire her to write ‘Daddy’, one of Plath’s best-known – and most celebrated – poems, in 1962. Alongside this, a later visit to her father’s graveside in the Winthrop Cemetery in Massachusetts would inspire her to write the acclaimed poem ‘Electra on Azalea Path’.
