“Daddy” is an eighty-line free verse poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath in 1962, four months before her death by suicide. The poem was published nearly three years later in Plath’s second book of poetry, Ariel. “Daddy” draws on details from Plath’s own life, including a previous suicide attempt and the figure of her German-speaking father, who died of diabetes when Plath was eight. Plath is often called a “Confessional” poet, after a revealing style of first-person autobiographical poetry that emerged in Plath's time and includes her contemporaries Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. As such, many critics have read the first-person “I” in “Daddy” as Plath herself, though others have located a degree of ironic distance between poet and speaker.

The apostrophic poem, addressed to the deceased “Daddy,” depicts the unnamed speaker’s attempt to exorcise an overwhelming paternal presence. She describes her relationship with her late father through a series of paired images, including foot and shoe, Nazi and Jew, bride and groom, and vampire and victim. Her titular “Daddy” appears as a broken statue she prays to recover but, trying to do so in his native German, the speaker cannot express herself. She had tried to join him in death in a failed suicide but joined him instead in marriage, wedding a man in her father's “model” (64). But by the time of the poem’s utterance, the speaker understands that he is a "vampire" who has consumed her in his various guises. She has thus put a stake in his heart and announced that she is finally “through” (80).