Karen Ford: On "About the Bee Poems"
Plath was finally sure of her genius in mid-October 1962, just after completing the Bee sequence, when she wrote to her mother that she was ready to start a new life: "I am a writer . . . I am a genius...
View ArticleMarjorie Perloff: On "About the Bee Poems"
The first of these, "The Bee Meeting," is a dream sequence in which the poet finds herself a victim, unprotected in her "sleeveless summery dress" from the "gloved,""covered," and veiled presences of...
View ArticleKathleen Margaret Lant: On "About the Bee Poems"
. . . In seeking to liberate the female body, Plath subjected it to a representational order which dictated its annihilation.These dueling impulses clearly war in Plath's bee sequence - the poems with...
View ArticleChristina Britzolakis: On "About the Bee Poems"
Plath increasingly finds ways of connecting what I have called the 'oracular' or 'transferential' drama of her poems with a larger historical process. The 1962 sequence which has become known as the...
View ArticleKaren Ford: On "Stings"
The third poem of the Bee sequence, "Stings" (214-15) fulfills this prediction. Not only have the bees been set free (they now dwell in and around their hive) but the speaker, too, we learn in the...
View ArticleMargaret Dickie: On "Wintering"
She is able, in "Wintering," to accept also the activities of women who "have got rid of the men,/ The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors." Knitting, tending the cradle, harboring life in her...
View ArticleKaren Ford: On "Wintering"
In "Wintering" (217-19), the final poem of the sequence, the speaker has come to her last and most important confrontation--that with herself. With her work completed, and with no demands upon her from...
View ArticleKate Moses: On Ariel
Ariel as edited by Ted Hughes has a particular trajectory. It seems to be a narrative of a woman who is intentionally moving toward her self-destruction. Robert Lowell’s foreword claimed “these poems...
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