♥ Loving Sylvia Plath ♥

- A Sylvia Plath Blog - Established 2010 - "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." --The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath - Anna, born in Poland, raised in Germany, forever 29 ;) - I have been loving Sylvia Plath since I read "The Bell Jar" back in 1998! ♥ (This was probably longer ago than when you stared wandering this earth ;) Your friendly "Sylvia Plath police" of the Internet, trying to debunk Internet myths & "educate" on everything Plath, even though it's mostly quotes these days... with focus on Plath referenced in popular culture and "Sylvia Plath 101". Follow me on instagram @lovingsylviaplath for the really good stuff! P.S.: Don't forget to visit my second tumblr sylviaplathink.tumblr.com and instagram @sylviaplathink entirely dedicated to Sylvia Plath-inspired tattoos :) And if you want to submit your tattoo or anything, tag me #lovingsylvia or #sylviaplathink or write me.

[lovingsylvia]

PSA!

I keep seeing this quote shared again and again all over the internet labeled as coming from Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963)!

No clue when or how or even why it happened, but it has been wrongly attributed to Plath a very long time ago!

And yet, you won't find it in The Bell Jar, because it's coming from Oscar Wilde's short story "The Canterville Ghost", written in 1887!

The whole paragraph reads:

"Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face in her hands.

"You mean the Garden of Death," she whispered.

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for a few moments there was silence. She felt as if she was in a terrible dream."

You can check both texts for yourself here:

&

[lovingsylvia]

Insomiac

The night 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. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie Exposes embarrassment -- the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, A garden of buggy rose that made him cry. His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks. Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue -- How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening! Those sugary planets whose influence won for him A life baptized in no-life for a while, And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby. Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods. Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of gray mirrors. Each gesture flees immediately down an alley Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance Drains like water out the hole at the far end. He lives without privacy in a lidless room, The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions. The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

--Sylvia Plath, written 23 May 1961, published in: Crossing the Water (1971)

[lovingsylvia]

It's here!! IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!

The Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil was published by Faber today! 1,000 pages!!!

"A landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students and general readers. Sylvia Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition.

The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts and related archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history."

...

Source: Description & photo faber.co.uk

[lovingsylvia]

HAPPY 66th BIRTHDAY Frieda Rebecca Hughes!!!

(born 1 April 1960 in London, England)

…

SECOND THOUGHTS

There was a moment In a hot bath of teenage umbrage With a razor blade, When I thought arterial blood Might attract a mother's love. But the mind's eye Knew death better For making nothing but empty spaces.

– Frieda Hughes, in Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors, 2009

...

Photo from January 2026 via https://www.independent.co.uk/

[dorkatamas]

Exactly 4 years after I submitted my PhD thesis, I received my copies of the book. Thank you to everyone who has been with me in this magical journey ✨ Please consider ordering the book for your university library!🩷

[lovingsylvia]

"Now it is spring, it is just heaven here. I never dreamed it was possible to be so happy."

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963, from a letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, written 4 March 1962

[lovingsylvia]

[...] in March I'll be rested, caught up and human.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956, from a letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, written Monday, 2 February 1953

[lovingsylvia]

Sylvia Plath's biographer Heather Clark - author of the epic biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, 2020 - in interview with the Polish writer Karolina Sulej in the newest issue of the women’s lifestyle and culture magazine Wysokie Obcasy

Photo: Sylvia Plath on 5 April 1956 in Paris; photogaphed by ex-boyfriend Gordon Lameyer

[lovingsylvia]

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death! RIP!

27 October 1932 Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 11 February 1963, Primrose Hill, London, England

…

"Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?"

–from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 121, September 1951

…

Photo: Sylvia Plath (age 20) in Northampton, Massachusetts, spring 1953

[lovingsylvia]

“So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Learn how the leaves grow on the trees. Open your eyes. The thin new moon is on its back over the green Cities' Service cloverleaf and the lit brick hills of Library Watertown, God's luminous fingernail, a shut angel's eyelid. Learn how the moon goes down in the night frost before Christmas. Open your nostrils. Smell snow. Let life happen.”

–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry for "Saturday morning, December 13, 1958"

[lovingsylvia]

"Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves."

– Sylvia Plath, from “Waking in Winter”, written c. 1960, in: The Collected Poems, 1981

[lovingsylvia]

"In black November. After a sliding rain Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk, Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron."

– Sylvia Plath, from “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest”, written c. autumn 1956, in: The Collected Poems, 1981

[lovingsylvia]

Anne Sexton (on the right) with Robert Frost (in the middle) as well as with Elizabeth Baker, Irene Orgel and George Lea at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury College, Ripton, Vermont in 1959

Photo source: https://archive.org/

[lovingsylvia]

HAPPY 97th BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!

(9 November 1928, Newton, MA – 4 October 1974, Weston, MA)

...

JUST ONCE

Just once I knew what life was for. In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood; walked there along the Charles River, watched the lights copying themselves, all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening their mouths as wide as opera singers; counted the stars, my little campaigners, my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love on the night green side of it and cried my heart to the eastbound cars and cried my heart to the westbound cars and took my truth across a small humped bridge and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home and hoarded these constants into morning only to find them gone.

--Anne Sexton, in: Love Poems, 1969

[lovingsylvia]

"It is you the knives are out for At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon"

– Sylvia Plath, from “The Swarm”, written 7 October 1962, Ariel (1966 - US edition only)

[lovingsylvia]

"NOVEMBER 1: SUNDAY

A wet, fresh air, grey skies. All the colors of the last weeks dulled to smoke-purple and blunt umbers."

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1959

[lovingsylvia]

"I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire."

-- Sylvia Plath, from “Poem for a Birthday - “Witch Burning”, written 4 November 1959, The Colossus and other poems (1960)