Poetry is an effective and artistic expression of feeling toward different feeling, topics, things, and people. Various poetic artists express their love or hatred using their talents. Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell are two such poets that have used their artistic talents to describe their feelings. Robert Lowell expresses his mixed and ambivalent feelings about his father in his poems "Commander Lowell" and "Terminal Days at Beverly Farms". In the same way, Sylvia Plath also expresses her ambivalent and mixed feelings in her poems "The Colossus" and "Daddy". Both poets write according to their own experiences and feelings with each of their fathers. It can be seen that in each author there is a distinct feeling of both love and hate for their paternal figures. .
Robert Lowell in his poem "Commander Lowell" praises and ridicules his father at the same time. "Commander Lowell" is a poem about Lowell's father and the life he lived from an engineer in the Navy to a citizen that moved from job to job. Lowell's father is described as a former Navy officer who's "training was engineering". (Line 31) Therefore, he was more informed on the academic aspects of ships rather than sailing them, and he is "cowed/ among the seadogs at the Sunday yacht club". (Line 32-33) Other people are described to have ridiculed Lowell's father also, making fun of the way he plays golf and labeling him as "naval". (Line 29) According to Lowell's description of this father, Lowell's father tried very hard to adjust to civilian life and tried to do the "popular" things that other civilians did such as joining a country club and participating in sports such as golf and pastimes such as yachting. However, in all his attempts, he makes himself out to be a fool and unable to adjust to the civilian crowd and life. Furthermore, Lowell's father is implied to be an unsatisfactory husband. This is evident when Lowell mentions his "Mother dragged to bed alone, / read Menninger, / and grew more and more suspicious.
