Modernism covers a vast panorama of socio-political events. In literature too, the period covers various art movements like Symbolism, Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism and Vorticism. The term “modernist poetry” is usually applied to the poetical works written roughly between 1890 and 1950. In such poetry, we find utter disillusionment and meaninglessness. The technique of collage, also called montage, marks most of the writings of the period. Sylvia Plath, our poet under consideration, also uses this technique in her poems. Her poems are composed of random pieces that need to be joined together in order to understand them. Plath is mostly celebrated for her confessional writing style. In this tradition, she follows the great confessional poet, Robert Lowell. But unlike her master who lays bare his experiences before his audience, Plath filters her experiences and her evoked emotions before presenting them to her audience. Plath in her poems seldom appears as a nice person, at least if one follows the words of her critics. This paper deals with the series of five bee-poems written by Plath. Plath, along with her husband Ted Hughes, associated herself with learning bee-keeping in the summer of 1962. The poems are about her experiences with the box of honeybees that she later decided to pet. The paper would analyse the relationship between the bees and the beehive on one hand, and men and society on the other. There is an undercurrent of fears, insecurities, vulnerabilities, introverted dispositions and feminist hopes under the beautiful skin of her poems, that this paper would attempt to unravel.
Research Scholar, Dept. of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
