Quotes & Sayings About Plath's Poetry

The still waters
Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack. — Sylvia Plath

Have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal - even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential. — Sylvia Plath

Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under. — Kelli Russell Agodon

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. — Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. — Sylvia Plath

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is? — Sylvia Plath

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero. — Sylvia Plath

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. — Sylvia Plath

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever. — Sylvia Plath

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATH
Conventions bleed my soul
squeeze me old
wear me grey
like a headstone in transit.
It's tradition and form
fear of the unknown
driving me dead
in tight spaces darkly.
I cry aloud
but who can hear
when I stand alone
in the middle of an art show ... . — Chila Woychik

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. — Sylvia Plath

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop. — Anne Carson

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart? — Sylvia Plath

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. — James Shapiro

The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath. — John Green

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence. — Francesca Lia Block

Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do. — Mary Lambert

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. — Sylvia Plath

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. — Sylvia Plath

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. — Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue — Sylvia Plath

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy. — Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again. — Sylvia Plath

But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. — Ted Hughes

So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards. — Ted Hughes

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls. — Sylvia Plath

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown. — Ted Hughes

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something. — Sylvia Plath

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. — Sylvia Plath

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm. — Sylvia Plath

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience. — Sylvia Plath

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song — Sylvia Plath

Empty, I echo to the least footfall — Sylvia Plath

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. — Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? — Sylvia Plath

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses — Sylvia Plath

Brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on. — Sylvia Plath

The tongues of hell are dull. — Sylvia Plath

We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me! — Avijeet Das

Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*....
If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course.

*This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should be medicated when there is risk of suicide, not mood swings. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen.
A far sea moves in my ear. — Sylvia Plath

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go.

(Three Women) — Sylvia Plath

We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me! — Avijeet Das

This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There's no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat. — Sylvia Plath

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint. — Sylvia Plath