Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plathwas one of the most renowned and influential poets, novelists, and short story writers of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She was married to fellow poet Ted Hughes from 1956 until they separated in September of 1962. They lived together in the United States and then the United Kingdom and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 October 1932
CountryUnited States of America
I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.
I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.
I am made, crudely, for success.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.
I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.
Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.
I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.