And Your Neat Mustache And Your Aryan Eye, Bright Blue. Panzer-man,

And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You
Here, images of Fascism are twinned with images of mechanisation, both of which serve to deepen the sense of existential angst; a sense that is further compounded later on in the poem when Plath refers to her first suicide attempt:
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
Commensurate with Laing's notions, the poet here uncovers a fundamental truth about the ontological autonomy of mankind; devoid of the support of God, humans become little more than bodies, flesh and bone, to be glued back together again when they break.
The candour of Plath's poem and, to some extent Hughes', is a clear reflection of Unamuno's notion of the importance of suffering in human connectivity and also the key to understanding how existentialism is treated in all of the poems we have been looking at here. Bereft of traditional support systems such as religion or a priori value systems, the existential man of woman depends on human connectivity for meaning and this, as Unamumno suggests, is best done through the artistic rendering of universals such as joy and suffering.
Works Cited
Annas, P (1988), A Disturbance in Mirrors: the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, London: Greenwood.
Camus, A (2000), The Myth of Sisyphus, London: Penguin.
Cox, C.B and Dyson, A.E (1963), Modern Poetry: Studies in Practical Criticism, London: Edward Arnold.
Gunn, Thom (1979), Selected Poems, London; Faber and Faber.
Heidegger, M (1985), Being and Time, London: Blackwell.
Hughes, T (2002), Selected Poems, London: Barnes and Noble.
Jaspers, K (1972), 'On my Philosophy', published in Kaufmann, W (ed), The Basic Writings of Existentialism, London: World Publishing, pp. 131-157.
Laing, R.D (1965), The Divided Self, London; Pelican.
Larkin, P (1988), Collected Poems, London: Faber and Faber.
Lutwack, L (1994), Birds in Literature, Florida: University of Florida.
Macquarrie, J (1973), Existentialism, London: Pelican.
Nietzsche, F (1972), 'The Gay Science', published in Kaufmann, W (ed), The Basic Writings of Existentialism, London: World Publishing, 104-106.
Plath, S (1999), Ariel, New York: Harper.
Sartre, J. P (1972), 'Existentialism and Humanism', published in Kaufmann, W (ed), The Basic Writings of Existentialism, London: World Publishing, 287-311.
Unamuno, M (1958), The Tragic Sense of Life, New York: Dover.
Further Reading
Moran, D (1999), Introduction to Phenomenology, London: Routledge.
Sartre, J.P. (2003), Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge.
Sokolowski, R (1999), Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge: Cambridge University.