Sylvia Plath - Poetry

Sylvia Plath was an unusual poetry writer. Her views of life and suicide are evident in almost all of her writings. Death apparently stayed on her mind constantly as her writings were full of horror, isolation and entrapment. By the time she was seventeen, she had published her first short story and poem. She received a scholarship and entered into Smith College where she graduated with honors, but while in college she had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized and underwent psychiatric therapy. She later when to Cambridge University and received her MA degree and in 1956, she married the British poet Ted Hughes. On February 11, 1963, she committed suicide.
In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bee Meeting,” she tells of a group of people meeting up for some reason. She first questions if they are there to meet her. The writer is paranoid to the way she is dressed because she worries that she isn’t dressed right and fears that the bees are going to get to her and hurt her. She is worried and scared about everything around her with the voices of the people changing, bean flowers, and she thinks the bees are trying to make her one of them. She fears this consumption. She attempts standing very still so the bees will think she is cow-parsley so they will leave her alone. It is obvious that the writer is expressing her fears through this poem. She even makes mention of the queen being up against the virgin bees who plan to eliminate her. I think with this part of the poem, she is referring to herself and the way she sees how the world is around her.
In Lady Lazarus, the writer is first stating that she is doing something she has attempted before and it is evident she is once again referring to dying. She talks about a cat having nine lives and that this is her third so apparently she is talking about suicide. She also states the first time was an accident, but the second wasn’t. She sees dying as a theatrical art and she does it well and her attempts at dying give her a charge. All of her writings are quite depressing and Plath seems to have enjoyed being depressed. I wonder if she ever wrote anything uplifting. If a person read enough of her writings, I could see the reader getting depressed. She is not my favorite writer and to be honest, I could do without ever reading anything else written by her again.