2. Sylvia Plath s father was a prestigious bee expert, inspiring her Bee Poems.
Sylvia s father, Otto Plath, emigrated to the United States from Germany as a teenager, and he grew up to become a professor of entomology at Boston University and an authority on bumble bees his 1934 book
Bumblebees and Their Ways analyzed bee colonies and the power of the queen in them. Otto was a huge influence on Sylvia s work one of her most famous poems is entitled Daddy, and it and others suggest she fell into the marry-your-father type of trope as well.
Otto died unexpectedly of complications from late-diagnosed diabetes when Sylvia was 8, and she would grapple with that loss for the rest of her life. At the height of her creative output, the fall of 1962, she wrote a sequence of five poems, the bee poems, in less than a week. They are hopeful and life-affirming works that were originally intended to end her collection