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 it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.
I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry.
And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.
I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.
So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead...
...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.