Many poets refer to the duality of death as cruel and merciful. Abraham Halfi asks his mother in “The Gold Digger” if death is somewhat human or if he is deaf and dumb, Emily Dickenson describes immortality as a companion of death, and e.e. cummings describes death as a lover, but there is a gruesome feeling when you read Sylvia Plath’s description of the grim-reaper as two people who are the complete opposite but are both ire and outsiders. Since we know the end of the story sentences like “I am red meat”, “I’m not his yet”, “somebody’s done for” get an outer-textual meaning that influences the reading, but when I try to think what Plath reminds me of, I can’t help but think about Edgar Allen Poe. Especially the lines “The dead bell, / The dead bell.” are reminiscent of his poems about the iron bells. Both Plath and Poe were probably what their contemporaries would consider mad or insane. In fact, Plath wrote several poems about her madness. Plath’s life and work are strongly linked, although she was not a very prolific writer. If we compare The Bell Jar to her diaries we can see that she is telling her life story even though she wrote fiction (Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams, for example). A reference to her suicide attempts can be found in the poem “Lady Lazarus” Takes pride in her ability to die, one can say that she even longs for it (”Soon, soon the flesh,/The grave cave ate will be/At home on me… Dying,/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well/I do it so it feels like hell./I do is so it fells real./I guess you could say I’ve a call”). But on the other hand, she still believes in her power to beat death – “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” So basically one might say that her duality about death was something that accompanied her since her youth, and the constant need to walk the line fueled both her work and her downfall. I do not believe that all artists have to go through what she did, but one thing I would like to adopt from her behavior is her totality, the use of real life materials, and one more thing – In the introduction to her collected poems, Ted Hughes, her husband, said this about her: “Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of her materials, she was quite happy to get a chair or even a toy”(Pg. 13). Her will to continue creating at all cost truly inspires me. When I read her prose I also felt very connected to her insights about writing, but this should be written in a different post.