'The Boot in the Face': The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.

'The Boot in the Face': The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath   In the following essay, I examine Plath's references to the Holocaust in light of her preoccupation with personal history and myth, female victimization, and the specter of nuclear war. I will conclude that Plath does not simply reduce the atrocity of the Holocaust to metaphor, but draws attention to the ambiguous and potentially dangerous interrelationship between "myth, history, and …

…of poetry, between the mythic desire that poetry transcend history and the "committed" purpose that it name history and thus remember it. An understanding of the "boot in the face" effect of Plath's treatment of the Holocaust, then, enables the recognition that the dissonances between history and myth in her poetry are not an aesthetic problem but work to prohibit complaisance about the definitions of--and the relationship between--myth, history, and poetry in the post-Holocaust world.