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
The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.
On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.
...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.- The Bell Jar
I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.'
Tree and Stone glittered, without shadows.My finger-length grew lucent as glass.I started to bud like a March twig:An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
One soul passes through the other, frail as smokeAnd utterly ignorant of the way it took.
I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone.
If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.