Emergent Ecopoetics in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and Sylvia Plath’s “The Bee Meeting” Aline Dolinh College

The works of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath are often presented in stark, binary contrast to each other – Bishop as a generally reserved, often cryptic observer of the natural world and Plath as a brutally expressive, easily legible vessel of her own uninhibited emotions. Yet this is a highly reductive simplification that ultimately flattens both women’s craft – Plath, who herself expressed disdain for the concept of such nakedly confessional verse, “as if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion” (Plath 355), is particularly ill-served by this interpretation. In actuality, her work often reveals surreal negotiations with the outside environment that seem – even if not explicitly influenced by Bishop – informed by the same sense of curiosity (and occasional anxiety) regarding the mechanisms of nature. These likenesses can be observed most clearly by bringing Plath’s “The Bee Meeting” in dialogue with Bishop’s “The Fish,” two poems that similarly confront animal life and result in striking, uncanny resolutions. While their topics differ, both texts use the same tactics of a clear narrative progression and anthropomorphizing imagery in order to interrogate their human speakers’ perception of animal...