This dissertation, "The Poetic Quests of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath" by Wai-yee, Agnes, Sit, 薛慧宜, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: The Poetic Quests of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath Abstract This dissertation examines the poetic quests of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath for a non-conforming poetic identity in an overtly male literary tradition. Conventional patriarchal values have placed women in a subjugated position and restricted the intellectual cultivation of woman writers. To break free from the double-bind dilemma, Dickinson and Plath reclaim a voice that speaks of their social subjugation and assert their poetic power by cultivating a poetics of death, love and nature. Dickinson and Plath criticise social restrictions and the construction of femininity by donning a mask of death. They denounce patriarchal marriage and conventional womanhood in their poetics of love. Their small nature imagery of a spider and a queen bee affirms their extraordinary poetic potential and creativity. Given a different biographical and social background of the two poets who lived a century apart, Dickinson and Plath speak in a different poetic voice but the focus of their poetics on death, love and nature is significantly about the subjugation of their gender. Since each poetics is a self-orientation journey, I aspire to examine how the woman poets in their distinctive poetic voice repossess a power to seek liberation from social conformity and reorient and affirm their unconventional poetic 'selves' in the male literary tradition. vi DOI: 10.5353/th_b3842964 Subjects: Feminist poetry, American - History and criticism