Queen bees: Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Plath & cross-Atlantic affiliations

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on the convergence of Edith Sitwell and Sylvia Plath in the April 1963 issue of The Atlantic, this essay recovers a mostly forgotten affiliation between iconic poets of the twentieth century. Sitwell was modernism’s midcentury Queen of Letters, crossing over from the literary magazines to popular American periodicals. She rose to prominence as a poet-critic during the heyday of the New Criticism and its male purveyors, yet fell to marginal status in the women’s poetry anthologies of the 1970s and 1980s. Plath admired Sitwell and considered her a formidable modernist foremother. The younger poet owned a copy of The Canticle of the Rose, and assessed Sitwell’s work in two college papers. Adorned in accolades and brocades, Dame Sitwell was modern poetry’s ultimate Queen Bee. Focusing on Plath’s initial reactions to her predecessor’s poetics, this essay also considers her Atlantic bee poems in light of Sitwell’s earlier “The Bee Oracles.” In addition, the essay discusses American women poets’ reception of Sitwell – and vice versa. Reconnecting these iconic women poets prompts new understandings of female literary influence that prove more technical than experiential. The understudied lines of affiliation between Sitwell and Plath can reveal new plotlines in modernist literary history.