In "Daddy," perhaps Plath's most famous poem,. . . Otto Plath appears coded, first as the patriarchal statue, "Marble-heavy, a bag full of God / Ghastly statue with one gray toe." Then, shockingly, he becomes a Nazi, playing tormentor to Plath's Jew. Although Otto Plath came from Silesia, in what was then Germany, he was not a Nazi, nor was his daughter Jewish, nor is there evidence that he mistreated her. In a classic transference, "Daddy" transforms the abandoned child's unmediated irrational rage into qualities attributed to its object: if Daddy died and hurt me so, he must be a bastard; I hate him for his cruelty; everyone else hates him too: "the villagers never liked you.". . . Plath knew that she hadn't ever completed the process of mourning for her father, and both she and "Daddy" recognize that in some way she had used Hughes as a double of her lost father. . . ."Daddy" operates by generating a duplicate of Plath’s presumed psychic state in the reader, so that we reexperience her grief, rage, masochism, and revenge, whether or not these fit the ‘facts.'

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From "Sylvia Plath," in Helen Vendler, ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. (Random House, 1987).