Plath chose to end her Ariel with four of the five-poem sequence Hughes buried in the middle, the so-called “bee poems.”
When Sylvia Plath died, her husband Ted Hughes rearranged the poems in Ariel, Plath’s most famous collection, to reflect his wife’s biographical arc, thus putting the darker writing at the end. Turns out that’s not the way the book was intended: Plath wanted her more optimistic “bee poems” as an ending, reports Katie Kilkenny at the Atlantic.
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