Evolution of vocabulary in the

poetry of Sylvia Plath

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Fabian B. Wadsworth, Jérémie Vasseur and David E. Damby
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany
.......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
In this study, we provide a quantitative analysis of the temporal evolution of
word choice across the career of Sylvia Plath, a poet who suffered from mental
illness, which culminated in her suicide. Her work provides an excellent case
study for temporally indexed changes in vocabulary due to well-dated records of
her productivity. We use simple functions to discriminate bulk trends in her
vocabulary and classify words into those that accelerate, decelerate, or represent
consistency in usage. Overall, we find that Plath’s vocabulary was exceptionally
consistent throughout her career from 1956 to 1963; however, we observe relative
changes in the frequency of words used. Two examples of this evolution are in
her use of colours and personal pronouns. Namely, we note a consistently
Correspondence:
increasing preference towards black and white above other colour words from
Fabian B. Wadsworth, 1956 to 1963 and, in contrast, we observe a marked transition from dominant use
Ludwig-Maximilians- of third-person feminine to dominant use of first-person singular in her later
Universität, Theresienstr. work. We find that the most dynamic changes in word use occurred between
41/III, 80333 Munich, March and May 1959 and we tie these observations to events recorded in Plath’s
Germany.
E-mail:
journal entries. We propose that our function-discrimination approach offers a
fabian.wadsworth@gmail vital tool in the objective analysis of word-use for understanding style evolution
.com and for correlation with a poet’s life events that may influence their work.
.................................................................................................................................................................................

1 Introduction Hypothesis regarding the universal positivity of lan-

The effect language has on our thinking and how
our thinking shapes our language remain highly
contentious topics (Pinker 1994; Chomsky 2002;
Deutscher 2011; Whorf et al. 2012). However, the
role of word choice and metaphor are known to
reflect aspects of our internal motives, conceptua-
lizations, and confidence (Pennebaker et al. 2003;
Lakoff and Johnson 2008). Therefore, in recent
years, much effort has been made to explore what
the quantification of (often very large) corpora of
textual information can tell us about the authors, or
society and humanity in general (Lieberman et al.
2007; Michel et al. 2011; Kloumann et al. 2012;
Dodds et al. 2014). These efforts have yielded fruit-
ful results, such as confirmation of the Pollyanna
guage (Dodds et al. 2014) and how global samples of
texts can contain fundamental patterns of social,
historical, and linguistic significance (Lieberman et
al. 2007). While these efforts acknowledge that a
quantitative approach surely smears nuances only
found by detailed textual analysis, it has facilitated
the quest for the largest scale laws of evolving lan-
guage, which may shape our understanding of the
relationship between language and mind.
The written language of prominent creative
people has been postulated to differ with quality
of mental health of the individual author (Silvia
and Kaufman 2010). Moreover, poets are thought
to have a greater than average propensity for mental
illness (Ludwig 1995; Kaufman 2001; Kaufman and
Baer 2002; Kaufman and Sexton 2006; Silvia and

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doi:10.1093/llc/fqw026 Advance Access published on 25 July 2016

Kaufman 2010). Often compared with the writings
of scientists, creative writers (as defined by Djikic et
al. 2006) are repeatedly found to express more
words associated with negative emotional states
than other groups of people (Djikic et al. 2006).
But such studies typically use a collected body of
work by single authors (Andreasen 1987), ignoring
the possibility that mental states and mental health
change drastically over a writer’s lifetime. Sylvia
Plath is a well-recognized case study for exploring
the relationship between written work and emo-
tional state as her work is a rich source of evidence
for her feelings about her developing situation
(Newman 1970; Kroll 1976; Axelrod 1990; Lant
and Plath 1993; Hargrove 1994; Moses 2007; King
2011). Especially coupled with the record of journal
entries, books, and stories, the written work of Plath
represents a valuable preservation of a writer’s life.
We present a temporally indexed analysis of the
work of Sylvia Plath and provide a range of analyt-
ical tools to form a view of her changing word-
choices toward her suicide. Correct chronicling of
her poems (Hargrove 1994) permits a word-choice
analysis of her work and subsequent interpretation
of time-dependent changes in word use across her
career in the context of a huge body of literary criti-
cism on the poems of Plath. When considered
alongside the detailed chronicling of her life events
of Kroll (1976) and others, we propose that trends
in bulk word usage can potentially be tied to the
broadest changes of circumstance in Plath’s life,
while admitting that this is a controversial link to
make (Lant 1993). We conclude that it is the
changes in the vocabulary of Sylvia Plath approach-
ing her suicide, rather than the more-static obser-
vations of her bulk vocabulary, which can best be
used to assess her declining mental health.
2 Materials and Methods
The poems of Sylvia Plath that appear in The
Collected Poems (Plath 1981) (hereafter referred to
as The Collected) are organized into both the
chronological sequence proposed by Hughes
(1981) and that of Hargrove (1994); the two se-
quences begin in 1956 and converge after 1959,
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017
vocabulary of plath
when Sylvia Plath diligently dated her work
(Fig. 1). A Python script is composed to count the
occurrence of each word in each poem and to filter
and remove punctuation and numbers and to con-
vert upper case letters to lower case letters while
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plurals are considered as words distinct from the
singular equivalent. The resultant data are then pro-
cessed to quantitatively constrain the occurrence of
words throughout The Collected. We note that The
Collected includes unfinished poems detailed in the
‘Notes’ section. Additionally, there is a small add-
itional archive of Juvenalia and poems that remain
uncollected in various places worldwide. We do
consider any poems additional to those that
appear in The Collected and those that appear in
the analysis by Hargrove (1994) and otherwise we
do not consider these additional poems. This is, in
part, justified by the fact that the detailed work of
time-indexing the possible range of composition
dates has only been applied to The Collected and a
few additional poems.
First, Plath’s productivity is assessed by consider-
ing the word-count as a function of time for each
poem in the period studied (1956–63; Fig. 1). The
error bars represent the uncertainty in the chrono-
logical precision quoted by Hargrove. In subsequent
analysis, we use only the chronology by Hargrove, as
the objectivity of the Hughes chronology has been
questioned (Hargrove 1994). Hargrove’s (1994)
analysis only extends from 1956 to 1959 and so,
for Plath’s late poems, we have to rely on the
Hughes chronology and the date-indexing of Plath
herself, hence both chronologies are here presented
(Fig. 1). We see that the productivity, manifest as a
word-count rate, varies in time (Fig. 1). Therefore,
we present subsequent temporal evolution data as a
function of poem number x rather than absolute
time—which is equivalent to normalizing the
time-axis by the productivity, or poem-rate. Were
we to analyse the poems using a non-normalized
time, all metrics of changing vocabulary are over-
shadowed by the productivity signal.
Second, we take individual words and assess their
usage with normalized time. To do this we define
two different mathematical functions, a power law
of the form y ¼ ax n and a linear function of the
form y ¼ mx þ b. The former case is equivalent to
661
F. B. Wadsworth et al.

A B

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Fig. 1 The poem-productivity of Sylvia Plath between 1956 and her death in 1963. A – The cumulative number of
poems as a function of time. Although similar here, the Hughes and Hargrove chronologies differ dramatically on the
order of the poems and in subsequent analysis the Hargrove chronology is used exclusively (see text). B – The cumu-
lative number of words written in the poems as a function of time. The histogram refers to the Hargrove chronology
and not the Hughes chronology

the latter case when n ¼ 1, a ¼ m, and b ¼ 0, such threshold-invariant value at a threshold of ¼7

that y ¼ ax or, equivalently, y ¼ mx. Reasonable
fits to the two regression types yield fit-parameters
that inform the general usage of particular words,
thereby allowing us to interpret style evolution
across the chronology of Plath’s work used herein
(see §3). In both cases, just two parameters can be
used to characterize the normalized evolution of
Plath’s vocabulary when x is the poem number in
chronological order and y is the cumulative fre-
quency of the word in question: the intercept b
and the power-law exponent n. Once the two regres-
sion types are fit to the data, we can assess the fre-
quency distribution of the fitting parameters a, n,
m; and b (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2). We
then identify individual words that yield best-fit
values of n that are very high, close to unity, or
very low (Fig. 3) to group words into those that
accelerate in usage, remain consistent in usage, or
decelerate in usage.
The total number of words in the unfiltered
corpus of Sylvia Plath’s 224 poems is 9,499. The
threshold in the number of occurrences we choose
before we include words in our analysis is defined by
the variation of the mean of the distribution of
fitted n and b, both of which converge to a
words (Supplementary Fig. 1). We apply a second
threshold when considering the regression analysis
such that a word should appear in at least four
poems to be included,  ¼ 4. This is important be-
cause, while a word may occur many times in the
corpus, if it appears all in one poem, then we cannot
differentiate time-dependent behaviour from poem-
to-poem. This results in a subset of the corpus of
788 words which will be the set used in the subse-
quent analysis. Nevertheless, when  ¼ 4, there are
cases of the most-rare words for which four data
points are being fit, which should be noted when
interpreting the distribution of fitting parameters.
3 Results and Interpretation
3.1 Trends in the filtered Plath corpus
By fitting both types of regression—the linear and
the power-law regressions (see §2)—to the normal-
ized evolution of cumulative frequency with nor-
malized poem number for these 788 words, we
find that 0:13  n  17:07, 4:56  b  0:65, 0:29
 m  5:57. Because n and a or m and b are allowed
to vary freely, this permits some limiting

662 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017

 vocabulary of plath

A B

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Fig. 2 The frequency distributions of fitted parameters b and n. A – The frequency distribution of the best-fit value of b
for all words in ¼7. B – The frequency distribution of the best-fit value for n for all words in ¼7. Both distributions
are fit with well by a non-central normal distribution (black curves)

Fig. 3 The temporal evolution of 18 individual words in the Sylvia Plath corpus. A – words that are most-consistent in
usage, B – words that decelerate with time and C – words that accelerate with time

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017 663

F. B. Wadsworth et al.
interpretations a priori for cases when a particular
regression is the best-fit to the cumulative frequency
of a given word as a function of poem number:
(1) For a linear regression that closely intercepts
the origin (b  0) or a power-law regression
where n  1, the word is consistent in usage
over normalizsed time.
(2) For a linear regression where b  0,the word is
consistent in usage over normalizsed time
from a threshold time t0 ¼ –b/m, before
which it was in less-consistent usage (see
text).
(3) For a linear regression where b  1, the word
is consistent in usage after an initial spike in
usage at low value of normalized time.
(4) For a power-law regression where n  1, the
word is not consistent in usage and exhibits
an acceleration in usage.
(5) For a power-law regression where n  1, the
word is not consistent in usage and exhibits a
deceleration in usage.
While the fitted values of both a and m contain
information (see Supplementary Fig. 2), we confine
our analysis to the b and n.
Fig. 2 shows the frequency distribution of fitted
parameters n and b. We note that both show a good
agreement with an off-centre normal distribution.
The frequency distribution of b values has a mean
and a median of –0.033 and 0.015, respectively,
showing that the average best-fit linear regression
goes through the origin such that words with an
onset time t06¼0 are rare (Fig. 2A; see below). The
frequency distribution of n values has a median at
1.03, which is equivalent to a linear regression, but a
mean of 1.37, showing that the best-fit power laws
predict an average accelerating usage of words (Fig.
2B). These frequency distributions for best-fit b and
n characterize the average evolution of vocabulary in
the poems of Plath and we find that, in general, her
work shows consistency. However, we suggest that it
could be at the end-members of these distributions
where the strongest deviations from consistency
occur.
We show in Fig. 3 some examples from the end-
member and median cases. For example, if we take
the words that have the n and b closest to 1 and 0,
664 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017
respectively, we can visualize the evolution of usage
of words that are, by this analysis, constrained to be
most consistent over the corpus (Fig. 3A;
Supplementary Tables). Such words include
‘great’, ‘lilies’, ‘window’ and ‘hill’, ‘legs’, ‘wings’.
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Similarly, if we take the words that have the
lowest n and highest b, we find the words which
are best described by a decelerating trend of usage
over the corpus (Fig. 3B; Supplementary Tables).
Words of such decelerating behaviour include
‘bride’, ‘loves’, ‘crying’ and ‘suns’, ‘fierce’, ‘said’.
Conversely, if we look for the words that have the
highest n and lowest b, we can find those words that
most accelerate in usage over the corpus (Fig. 3C;
Supplementary Tables). For this last subset of accel-
erating words, we can qualitatively see that for some
of them, such as ‘kill’, ‘husband’, and ‘veil’, the
usage before a critical onset time is zero, which ex-
plains why the linear regression fits better than the
power-law description. We use this observation to
introduce the concept of a word-onset time t0 ,
which refers to the date before which Plath does
not make regular use of that particular word. This
critical onset behaviour contrasts with, for example,
‘hurts’, ‘marry’, and ‘babies’ which are well
described by the power-law behaviour (Fig. 3C).
Note that the word-onset time t0 does not refer to
the first occurrence of the word.
To look in more detail at the variance of b and n,
we can plot them as a function of one another,
whence we find a strong inverse relationship
(Fig. 4A). This relationship tells us that our discrim-
ination into simple categories of consistent (near the
centre of Fig. 4A), accelerating (top-left quadrant of
Fig. 4A), and decelerating (bottom right quadrant of
Fig. 4A) is valid as the data are not spuriously dis-
tributed elsewhere. There is significant spread of the
data in the accelerating top-left quadrant, which we
explore further.
If we now further discriminate the words to
select those that yield best-fit values of n  1 and b
 0 (words that fall in the upper left quadrant of
Fig. 4A), we can look for how variable is the word-
onset time t0 . To do this, we look only at the subset
of words for which the linear regression produced a
better agreement with the data than the power law
regression. This is akin to asking if the concept of t0
 vocabulary of plath

A B

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Fig. 4 Detailed information in the fitted parameters. A – The variation of the best-fit n parameter with the linear
parameter b for which error bars result from the goodness of fit of each parameter to each word evolution, respectively.
B – The frequency distribution of the word onset time t0 computed from the linear regressions such that t0 ¼ b=m
using only regression parameters for words that accelerate in usage (n > 1; b < 0) and for which the linear regression
proved a better fit to the data than the power law regression. This has been converted back to the equivalent poem-
number at which t0 occurs

is a better model for the data. We find words that
are typified by this behaviour are again ‘husband’,
‘veil’, and ‘kill’ (Fig. 3C). The frequency distribution
of t0 for these words is given in Fig. 4B (bin size:
2.68; total number of bins: 60) and shows a bimodal
distribution with a second peak centred on poem
105–108 (‘A winter ship’, ‘Old ladies home’,
‘Aftermath’, and ‘Magnolia shoals’), written be-
tween 25 March and 27 May 1959 (Hargrove
1994). This distribution tells us that when we look
at the end-member evolution of words we can
characterize as accelerating and those which are
not significantly used before a critical onset time,
we find that there is a specific era in Plath’s work
where a new group of words appeared in her vo-
cabulary which, prior to this onset time, were not in
use. This is a fascinating tool of discrimination, as it
distinguishes words which represent a shift in style
(see §4) and could, potentially, be correlated with
any external pressures or influences that might cata-
lyse such a shift.
By this method we can distinguish consistent,
decelerating, and accelerating word families
(Fig. 3; Supplementary Tables), which we propose
is a unique and powerful tool for the quantitative
analysis of literature.
3.2 Trends in word classes: colours and
personal pronouns
We can analyse words in an independently defined
subset, such as colour adjectives (Fig. 5) or personal
pronouns (Fig. 6). Usage of trends in such subsets
can be informative when taken in the context of the
heritage of literary analysis on Plath’s work (see §4).
In these analyses, we take the cumulative frequency
of a given word, such as ‘green’ in the case of the
colour adjectives, relative to the mean usage of all
words in that class of words, for example all colour
words. This permits us to look at how colour words
and personal pronouns shift in dominance relative
to one another. For the case of colour words, we

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F. B. Wadsworth et al.
Fig. 5 Information recorded in the colour adjectives. The
cumulative of the mean usage of all colour words, which
is linear with poem number (dashed line), is subtracted
from the cumulative frequency of an individual colour
word (labelled) showing the relative dominance of a
given word over the others in the group. Inset: the pos-
ition of these words in the n versus b plot (see Fig. 4)
confine our analysis to the nine colours seen in
Fig. 5, as other colours are far rarer.
The colour words display reasonably consistent
behaviour (n1 and b0; Fig. 5 inset) with ‘black’
and ‘white’ remaining in high relative usage
throughout Plath’s work. ‘green’ is less consistent,
dropping out of dominant relative colour usage
toward the end of her work (Fig. 5). ‘Red’ and
‘blue’ are close to the mean usage of colour adjec-
tives, and less commonly used colours such as
‘brown’ and ‘purple’ are far below the mean usage
of colour adjectives.
In contrast with the gentle evolution of colour
usage, there is a marked reorganization of the usage
of personal pronouns. Plath’s dominant pronoun
class at the start of her work is the third-person
feminine, typified by the words ‘her’ or ‘she’. In
contrast, toward the end of her work, there is a
dramatic shift to the dominant use of both first-
person singular, for example ‘I’ and ‘me’, and
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Fig. 6. Information recorded in the personal pronouns.
The cumulative of the mean usage of all personal pro-
nouns, which is linear with poem number (dashed line),
is subtracted from the cumulative frequency of an indi-
vidual subset of the pronouns (labelled) showing the rela-
tive dominance of a given word over the others in the
group. Inset: the position of these words in the n versus b
plot (see Fig. 4)
third-person neutral, for example ‘it’, pronouns
(Fig. 6). This shift occurs around poem number
120–150, translating to dates of 22 November 1959
(Hargrove 1994) and 30 September 1961 (Hughes
1970), respectively.
As with the analysis of the most accelerating and
most decelerating end-members in Plath’s work, we
put forward that quantitatively defined patterns such
as this can guide the Plath reader to search for mean-
ing in, for example, the shift in voice from ‘she’ to ‘I’.
This may well prove to be an observation bolstered
by detailed literary analysis of The Collected.
4 A Discussion
4.1 A critique of our approach
Poetry is perhaps the most distilled and concen-
trated form of writing disciplines which undergoes

a variety of methods of composition, revision, and
timings of finalization. A poem’s genesis is often not
a point event, but rather is the result of influences
accumulated over, sometimes, many years and mul-
tiple revisions. This has the effect that the compos-
ition time (mental or actual) of a single poem may
be smeared over years with aspects of the construc-
tion occurring at very different times, eventually all
juxtaposed in the final piece. This uncertainty in the
timing of poem-composition, however, lends cre-
dence to the use of blunt tools like the statistical
fits used here to look for word use trends.
Furthermore, in the case of Plath’s work, and in
particular the Ariel poems, we can be confident
from the rapid writing rate (sometimes two poems
per day in 1962–63; Fig. 1), the proximity to her
death, and the exact date-indexing of her original
manuscripts, that these poems were written quickly
and with little revision. Therefore, we are confident
that we are capturing an accurate and complete
overview of the temporal evolution of Plath’s
word use in these late poems. The early poems,
however, clearly include uncertainty in composition
date, composition time duration, and the degree to
which revisions were important. In this regard, we
simply rely on those poems published in The
Collected and the time-indexing provided by
Hargrove (1994) and acknowledge this shortcom-
ing. Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946, 1954) proposed
that authorial intent as transmitted to a text is not
interpretable from the text alone. Called The inten-
tional fallacy, it has received much attention and
could be extended to criticism of this work because
we posit links between trends of word use in poems
with the changing mental state of the poet. In his
landmark 1977 essay The Death of the Author,
Barthes (1977) tells us that the critical reader owes
more responsibility to the text than to the author
and that the mediation of intention by the text and,
perhaps worse, by the subjectivity of the reader, neg-
ates interpretation of intent at all. While we ac-
knowledge the important problem of interpreting
the intentions of Plath, our approach is independent
of intent; we propose that the trends that we identify
in word usage over her career are the manifestation
of a changing style and overall vocabulary of refer-
ence from which Plath drew. This distinction
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017
vocabulary of plath
between intent (conscious) and (potentially less-
conscious) style is critical to make for the present
analysis.
4.2 Broad associations: dynamism in
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Plath’s poetry and life
Many scholars have investigated themes and
changes in the work of Plath (Newman 1970;
Perloff 1973). A demarcation is often made between
(1) the pre-1956 poems, usually referred to as ‘ju-
venilia’ (Hughes 1981), (2) the early poems, most of
which appear in The Colossus, (3) the transition
poems (Perloff 1973), and (4) the late poems,
which appear in Ariel and Winter Trees. We would
expect to find dynamism in the word choice
throughout these periods given that Plath’s poetic
career can be shown to transition from less sure-
footed to confident. Evidence for this is explicit in
the journals and letters of Plath wherein we read
early accounts of anxiety, fearing that she would
be ‘accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or
feminine tactics’ (Plath 2007) while later we find
that she is bolstered by interactions and successes
such as she confesses to her mother in a letter
(1962): ‘My voice is taking shape, coming strong. . .’
(Plath 1975). Ted Hughes, in his controversial essay
on the chronology of Plath’s work, reinforces the
case for dynamism by suggesting that Plath aban-
doned a ‘highly disciplined’ and ‘highly intellectual’
style toward the end of her poetry, thus qualitatively
testifying to temporal evolution (Hughes 1970).
Furthermore, there is mounting evidence, not least
found in the Journals of Plath that these four peri-
ods in her poetry are related to periods of her life, of
her relationship with Ted Hughes and of her mental
state (Taussig 2001). Here we give a few examples of
how what we track as dynamic changes or as repre-
sentations of consistency in Plath’s work compare
with previous textual analyses and discuss the rele-
vance of our methodology.
Plath’s poetry is dominated by broad consistency
in word-choices (Fig. 2). Coarsely, however, words
in the class n  1, b  0 are more common than
those that occur at n  1, b  0 (Figs. 2 and 4).
This means that Plath’s poetry has more accelerating
words than decelerating words. In detail, we have
distinguished two types of accelerating behaviour:
667
F. B. Wadsworth et al.
(1) that best-characterized by the power-law behav-
iour and exemplified by the word ‘hurts’ and (2)
that best-characterized by the linear behaviour
with a word-onset time and exemplified by, for ex-
ample, the word ‘husband’ or ‘kill’. We have also
observed that for this class of accelerating words for
which the linear regression is a better description
than the power law regression, the computed value
of t0 shows a bimodal frequency distribution (Fig.
4B). This means that Plath has a smaller subset of
accelerating words which came into usage at a
common time later in her career: constrained to
25 March and 27 May 1959.
If we turn to Plath’s journal entries written be-
tween these dates and in the following months, we
can establish the broad life events that might be
associated with the influx of new word choices
into her otherwise consistent poetry. During this
period, Plath attended Robert Lowell’s poetry
course at Boston University, conceived Frieda
Hughes (June 1959), and from September to
November 1959, lived at Yaddo artist’s colony
(Plath 2007). On 20 May 1959, Plath writes that
she must ‘Go inward’ and ‘. . .write about the
things of the world with no glazing.’ (Plath 2007,
pp. 484–5). This after she resolved to ‘start with
real things: real emotions, and leave out the baby
gods, the old men of the sea, the thin people, the
knights, the moon-mothers, the mad maudlins, the
lorelei, the hermits, and get into me.’ (25 February
1959; Plath 2007, p. 471). For Burton (2013), this
period that began in early 1959 represents an inspir-
ational moment in the trajectory of Sylvia Plath’s
work. Burton (2013) further reminds us that Plath
would later describe these developments thus: ‘the
shift in tone is already history’ (from Plath, The
Spoken Word 1963). Hargrove (1994) agrees with
this view and, like Burton (2013), suggests that the
influence of Robert Lowell, and to a lesser extent,
Anne Sexton, on Plath at this time was large. Not
least giving her permission to harness in her poetry
the personal issues with which she was actively enga-
ging with her therapist Ruth Beuscher. Hargrove
(1994) additionally implicates Roethke as a defining
influence which Plath took to be a proponent of the
personal in her work. These assertions and life
events are in sync with our finding that there is a
668 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017
marked ‘onset’ of new words in 1959 (Fig. 4B). Most
telling, the shift at this time is consistent with the
change we observe in the use of personal pronouns.
Plath shifts to dominant use of first-person at the
expense of most others in her work. This strikes as
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consistent with the emphasis of the personal in the
work of both Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell and
with Burton’s (2013) suggestion that this period was
the most influential in shaping the later Ariel style.
The affiliation of Plath with the confessional
poets is somewhat ambivalent (Kinzie 1970; Lant
1993), feels uncomfortable in suggesting Plath’s
poetry is grounded in life experiences. Some of
this ambiguity may arise from her ‘. . .ambivalence
about her identity relations with her represented
‘‘I’’’ (Axelrod 1990). If the word ‘I’ is to be intim-
ately coupled to an image of the Self, then the def-
inition of Lant (1993) of confessional poetry is apt
to repeat: ‘the central experience of shattering of the
self, and the labour of fitting it together again or
finding a new one’. Or, in Plath’s own words, ‘one
makes of one’s own heavens and hells a few hunks of
neatly typewritten paper’ (Plath 2007). Our analysis
shows that the first-person pronouns come to dom-
inate the time-evolution landscape of the personal
pronouns toward the end of her poetry (Fig. 6).
Perhaps, then, our analysis not only testifies that
The Collected records dynamic evolution of word-
use but also a shift from an early non-confessional
‘highly intellectual’ (Hughes 1981) style to a late
more-confessional, immersive style.
The period in 1959, which is here cited as a quan-
titative shift in style, includes the conception of
Plath’s first child (June 1959). In the journals of
this period Plath makes heavy reference to babies,
conception, fertility, and birth (Plath 2007). Indeed,
the word ‘babies’ is among our here-defined list of
the 20 most accelerating words and is associated
with a t0 at 28 January 1959. Workers have sug-
gested that the poems appearing in the Ariel collec-
tion share a theme of fertility (Moses 2007; Wilkins
2010; King 2011). Fertility, blood, and the colour-
word ‘red’ have been associated with the theme of
the Triple Goddess in the Ariel collection (Wilkins
2010). Wilkins (2010) refers heavily to the influence
of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (Graves 1961)
on the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Indeed, some have claimed that the gravity of
Hughes influence on the work of Plath is most
clearly manifest in their shared appreciation of the
Graves work (Lindop 2003). Graves states ‘. . .the
New Moon is the white goddess. . .the Full Moon,
the red goddess. . .the Old Moon, the black goddess’
(Graves 1961), a delineation of concepts that would
be familiar to Plath. Our analysis can be used to
confirm that ‘moon’, ‘white’, ‘black’, and ‘red’ are
among the most consistently used words in the
Plath corpus with n values close to 1 of 1.15, 1.06,
0.88, and 1.16, respectively. Furthermore, the three
colours ‘white’, ‘black’, and ‘red’ are among the
most-used colours (Fig. 5) and, indeed, the most-
used adjectives in general. Wilkins (2010) goes on to
draw the investigative thread through associations
between these colours, the concept of the moon and
the triple goddess, fertility, motherhood, and the
Graves work. This is a good example of how our
coarse bulk trend analysis coupled with a detailed
reading can provide a coherent picture of word sig-
nificance and evolution.
Finally, the link between creativity and mental
illness remains a controversial one (Weisberg
2006; Silvia and Kaufman 2010), with authors
claiming no relation (Schlesinger 2009), some rela-
tion (Weisberg 2006; Sawyer 2011), or very strong
links (Nettle 2001; Kottler 2006; Power et al. 2015).
Runco (1998) explores this with specific focus on
the work of Sylvia Plath and concludes that the
complexities of Plath’s life and work categorically
preclude a strong objective understanding of her
suicide, the final manifestation of a long period of
mental illness. We hope that the tools we present
herein will be of use to those seeking to interpret
creative people’s mental states as it is surely always
the case that this is a temporally evolving process,
often toward tragedy. As we began by saying, the
possibility of links between thought and the lan-
guage we choose to use, or the link between lan-
guage and our mind has fuelled fierce debate
(Pinker 1994; Deutscher 2011; Whorf et al. 2012).
We show that a few tentative links can be made
between word-use and the facts of Plath’s life
(such as the onset of the use of the word ‘babies’
or the shift to the use of ‘I’ over ‘she’). However, we
would consider that tools-of-discrimination such as
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017
vocabulary of plath
we show here, may be of powerful use as the debate
surrounding words and our mind continues and, in
particular, to elucidate the link between language
and mental health.
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5 Concluding Remarks
Approaching her suicide, Plath’s productivity accel-
erated until she wrote one to two poems per day
(1962–63; Fig. 1). We use simple mathematical
functions to dissect Plath’s language into word-
classes of acceleration, consistency, or deceleration.
We find that in general Plath’s poetry is consistent
in vocabulary (Fig. 2); however, there are end-
member exceptions (Fig. 3). Words that accelerate
in terms of normalized time are words that Plath
used more regularly in her poetry towards her
death. These words are potentially interpretable in
terms of her life events and changing influences. The
tools we develop and examples we provide, bol-
stered by detailed reference to the vast body of
Plath scholarship, may serve to elucidate how
poet’s word choices evolve through time and to
contribute to the debate as to a link between creative
people and mental illness.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for discussion with James
Pennebaker, Alexander Todaro, Sabine Kobayter,
Robert Parker, Sam Waterman, Ralph Kellas,
Deryn Rees-Jones, Ann Skea, Rebecca Hearne, and
John Wheeler. And we acknowledge constructive
comments by anonymous reviewers and editorial
handling by Edward Vanhoutte. The authors are
members of Figure One: An Independent Science
Collective and as their inaugural paper, they are
grateful to their supporters and friends.
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