Among modern American poets, Elizabeth Bishop (1911- 1979) and Sylvia Plath (1932- 1963), are endowed with a special poetic style. Within the poetry of the twentieth century, Bishop's and Plath's styles are characterized by melancholy, trauma, and gloom. Both poets are famous for writing poems about their personal life and suffering. This paper reveals how both poets identify themselves with trauma, which helps in their self-reconciliation. The paper establishes a relationship between trauma, and literature, based on Sigmund Freud's definition of trauma. The research aims at understanding Bishop's and Plath's poetry on a deeper broader scale beyond viewing them as simply personal or individual traumatic experiences.
Freud explains that traumatic neuroses take place when a flashback of past painful memories occurs to the mind as if they are happening now; "lie(s) at their root". The significance of trauma lies in its power to stick to the deep layers of memory. Freud comments on this saying that "it may happen, too that a person is brought so completely to a stop by a traumatic event which shatters the foundations of his life that he abandons all interest in the present and future and remains permanently absorbed in mental concentration upon the past" (316). Freud states that some people suffer from trauma to the extent of being imprisoned in the past experiences, refusing to live new experiences of the present and the future.
Bishop's three poems Sestina (1965), One Art (1976)and First Death in Nova Scotia (1965), explore trauma .