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
Is there no way out of the mind?
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
I am myself. That is not enough.
Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.
I am what I feel and think and do.
I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.