Sylvia Plath (1932–63,) pseudonym Victoria Lucas, was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She is celebrated for the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and her novel The Bell Jar (1963.) Her deeply personal, confessional portrayals of a feeling of alienation and self-destruction embody women’s situation in mid-20th-century America.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath had published in Seventeen, Mademoiselle, The Christian Science Monitor, and other newspapers by the age of 20. She was educated at Smith College, where she had bipolar disorder and clinical depression, and attempted suicide.
Plath then studied English as a Fulbright fellow in Cambridge’s Newnham College, where she married the English poet Ted Hughes. The couple had two children, taught briefly in the U.S., and settled first in London and then Devon.
Plath and Hughes separated in 1962, a year before Plath committed suicide. Her work attracted attention only after her death through her obituaries and news stories.
Plath published her first volume of poems, A Winter Ship (1960,) anonymously, at age 28. With her name, she published the volume of poems The Colossus (1960) and a radio play, Three Women (1962,) set in a maternity home. Her late poetry was published posthumously in Ariel (1965,) Crossing the Water (1971,) and Winter Trees (1972.) Hughes edited her Collected Poems (1982; posthumous Pulitzer.)
Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar (1963,) was published just before her suicide (by gassing,) under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It was a New York Times bestseller list for six months.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sylvia Plath
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Self-Discovery
Is there no way out of the mind?
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: The Mind
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Death
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live the loves I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.
—Sylvia Plath
Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.
—Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Perspective
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Silence
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Relaxation, Stress
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Mental Illness
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Universities, Education
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Writing
Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
—Sylvia Plath
I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Marriage
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Poets, Poetry
How frail the human heart must be—a mirrored pool of thought…
—Sylvia Plath
Topics: Kindness
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