Comparison of Sylvia Plath and Parveen Shaker with Special Reference to Their Selected Poems in Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines some poems of American English poet Sylvia Plath and Pakistani Urdu poet Parveen Shaker: two great female poets of twentieth century in the context of feminism. It explores their social, cultural, and religious diversity and the stunning commonalities between them under the patriarchal forces in their specific context. This study discusses the biographies and compares them to explore the analogies and disparities. The eight poems by each poet from their major poetry collections: “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath and “Khushboo” by Parveen Shaker were selected for analysis. First, the each poem was analyzed individually and then the common and different themes, characteristics, and poetic style were deducted and compared.All the comparative and analytical strategies used in any comparative, analytical, and systematic studies are applied here. The study explores the elements of interests in the form of analogy between the biographies of two poets and the selected poems in Urdu from Parveen Shaker’s ‘Khushboo’ have been translated into English by the researcher of this study. This research is specifically important for literary institutes as it provides a lot of knowledge to the students of literature and literary criticism and is beneficial for those who are analysts and have keen interest in Parveen Shaker and Sylvia Plath’s life and poetry and tend to explore them in future.

Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Parveen Shaker, Twentieth Century Female Poets, Characteristics of modern poetry, Comparison between two poets.