![]() ![]() Plath is primarily known for her poetry, but earned her greatest reputation for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously weeks before her death. You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books. Sylvia Plath (19321963) was an American author and poet. As tragic and dark as her end would be, it's nonetheless thrilling to watch this great artist becoming herself. Plath got there in a couple of bursts - first here in The Colossus, then a few years later in the months before she died when she wrote much of what would become Ariel. Most poets slowly edge their way, poem by poem then book by book, to their major work. But before the destruction, we get to watch Plath begin to become a great poet. The strange psyche at the core of these poems is made powerful by its seemingly limitless ability to endure self-destruction. Plath's extraordinary verbal inventiveness has begun to find a subject equal to it: the shape-shifting the mind exerts on the world, the ways the heart can inflect, even infect, what happens. And then I’ll know what life is.The poem's subject is no longer what's being looked at but the looking itself, or, more precisely, the strained psyche behind the eyes that distorts what's being seen. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species the rites of birth, marriage and death all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. ![]() I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don’t quite reach it. There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. Uncorrected proof of the 1967 Faber & Faber edition, published seven years after the first British. This from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ( via): You can read her observations jotted in one of her many journals. Spare me from cooking three meals a day - spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.” Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. “Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. You can hear the teenage Plath enjoying life and wondering what happens next: Originally published in 1960, The Colossus was the only volume of Sylvia Plaths poetry. You can read Plath’s ode to love and her haunting line in Lady Lazarus: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well” and know they are thoughts of the same person at different moments, one utterance no more meaningful than the other.ġ940 : Winthrop, Massachusetts, U.S.A – Sylvia Plath dressed to help the nurse who was caring for her father Otto Plath, who died shortly after this picture was taken Read The Colossus by Sylvia Plath available from Rakuten Kobo. We think of our lives from where we are now. The story does not run from cradle to grave. But people don’t live just in the present, the past or the future. There’s a temptation to attribute to her a morbid outlook that dogged her entire life. Knowing the dates of Plath’s mortal existence, we can frame a complete story. How did a romantic woman enraptured by life come to end her own at just 30? She left behind her husband Ted Hughes, their two children and words. ![]() Plath was the American poet who began writing journals at the age of eleven and continued documenting her life as confessional until her suicide. Many of us have heard of Plath (Octo– February 11, 1963) – but have you heard her read her poems? In 2010, Sylvia Plath – The Spoken Word was produced by the BBC and The British Library. A second was issued on cassette and vinyl in 1977. The first recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry was published in 1975. Sylvia Plath, 1959 Photograph: Rollie McKenna/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution ![]()
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