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Tell the Bees that Transcendentalism is Lost: The Search for the Lost Transcendental Space in the Bee Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s bee poem, “The Humble-Bee,” expresses the nineteenth-century transcendentalist philosophy of finding wholeness and oneness in nature while Sylvia Plath’s twentieth-century bee poems function as a response to Plath’s feelings of alienation and repression, indicating that transcendental peace is lost in the postmodern era. Emerson’s poem indicates the spiritual fulfilment found through observing bees and highlights the harmony between humans and nature, but women of the nineteenth century find difficulty achieving this same level of freedom; Emily Dickinson reclaims the language of transcendentalism in her bee poetry to explore a world otherwise denied to her. The effects of the industrial revolution then sparked a mass disconnect between humans and nature, a disconnect reflected in the bee poetry of Sylvia Plath; she rejects the inherited tradition of transcendentalist poetry by using her bee poems to demonstrate discomfort within nature and society.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:etd-5720
Date01 May 2023
CreatorsRoss, Adyson M
PublisherDigital Commons @ East Tennessee State University
Source SetsEast Tennessee State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright by the authors.

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