The Confession Booth
Plath is often lumped into what's called "confessional poetry." This basically means that she and other poets like her weren't shy about drawing from personal experiences when writing their poems. (Were they totally self-obsessed? Maybe. But maybe that's okay sometimes.) In "The Colossus," for example, you'll notice that she uses the word "I" a lot—you know, like in the lines, "I am none the wiser." (10) and "I crawl like an ant in mourning" (12). That fact that she's thought of as a confessional poet leads a lot of people to assume that "The Colossus" and other of Plath's father-themed poems are about her own father who died.
Of course, if all Plath did was regurgitate past traumas without any kind of interesting language, we probably wouldn't be sitting here talking about her today. Though she loots her troubled past for inspiration, she constantly relates those feelings by hurling one striking image after another at us. (You might be tempted to duck, but don't. You'll be wowed by what hits you.) Instead of just talking in a generally sad way about how her dad died, Plath shows her speaker, haunting the wasteland of a giant, fallen statue. She paints the creepy landscape so vividly, you almost feel like you're there: "Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered / In their old anarchy to the horizon-line" (20-21). (Sounds like a Tim Burton movie, right?) Plath's incredible ability to wow us with such specific and striking language is proven in poem after poem. Check out "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus" for just two examples.