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lovingsylvia · 27 days
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“[…] 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
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lovingsylvia · 2 months
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Today marks the 61st anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death! RIP!
Sylvia Plath 27 October 1932 Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 11 February 1963, Primrose Hill, London, England, United Kingdom
"I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future."
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Excerpt: December II for December 1955
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Photo: Sylvia Plath at Smith College Quadigras dance in May 1954
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lovingsylvia · 2 months
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“If I get through this year, no matter how badly, it will be the biggest victory I’ve ever done.”
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Tuesday night: November 5, 1957
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lovingsylvia · 2 months
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"Monday morning: January dry, hard, glittering, cold, and the wicked naked beauty of the scraped blue skies and the sun sparks ricocheting jazzily off car rooftops."
--The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry 164 for January 26, 1953
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lovingsylvia · 3 months
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"January 10, 1953: Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within."
--The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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lovingsylvia · 3 months
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Hi there! Quention, in your opinion wich one is the best and truthful Sylvia biography out there? Any recs? Thank you and happy new year
Hello, definitely Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark, published in 2020!
Happy New Year to you, too!
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lovingsylvia · 3 months
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"Winter Trees, Primrose Hill" by Amanda White
The house at 3 Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill, London, England with Sylvia Plath's English Heritage blue plaque on the wall, where she lived from January 1960 until August 1961.
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lovingsylvia · 4 months
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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 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, Notebook Notes, Saturday morning December 13, 1958
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lovingsylvia · 4 months
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Exhibit: "The Bell Jars: Lyman Conservatory and Sylvia Plath’s Botanical Imagination"
September 15, 2023 through June 28, 2024 at Smith College Botanical Gardens, Northampton, MA
"The Bell Jars: Lyman Conservatory and Sylvia Plath’s Botanical Imagination tells this story, shedding new light on Plath’s life and work while also examining the power of interspecies encounters between people and plants. Using archival materials and Plath’s literary work as a guide, this exhibit invites visitors to inhabit Lyman as Plath once did. Cross-pollinating the humanities and natural sciences, we hope to examine Plath’s botanical imagination and Lyman’s role in cultivating it."
For more information on the exhibit, see The Botanic Garden website at: https://garden.smith.edu/explore/exhibits/temporary-exhibits/bell-jars-lyman-conservatory-and
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Description & photo: https://garden.smith.edu/
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lovingsylvia · 4 months
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“What happens in the heart simply happens.”
— Ted Hughes, from Child’s Park, Birthday Letters, 1998
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lovingsylvia · 4 months
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“It is “a crisp frosty November night, with the lights dry and bright against the hard black edges of the dark” and “the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist.””
— The Unabridged Jourals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 35 & 31, 1950
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lovingsylvia · 4 months
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Sylvia Plath reads November Graveyard, written 1956
The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun. At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
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lovingsylvia · 5 months
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Letter in November
Love, the world Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rat’s-tail Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. It is the Arctic, This little black Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies hair. There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable. It cushions me lovingly. I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My Wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red. This is my property. Two times a day I pace it, sniffing The barbarous holly with its viridian Scallops, pure iron, And the wall of the old corpses. I love them. I love them like history. The apples are golden, Imagine it —   My seventy trees Holding their gold-ruddy balls In a thick gray death-soup, Their million Gold leaves metal and breathless. O love, O celibate. Nobody but me Walks the waist-high wet. The irreplaceable Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
–Sylvia Plath, written 11 November 1962, Ariel, 1965
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lovingsylvia · 5 months
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HAPPY 95th BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!
(9 November 1928, Newton, MA – 4 October 1974, Weston, MA)
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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
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Photo: “Anne Sexton talks on the phone in her office after winning the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry: Live or Die, 1967.” // Credit: Bettmann Archive          
Source: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-europe-news-sylvia-plath-anne-sexton-friendship-changed-female-roles-7989566/                         
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lovingsylvia · 5 months
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This could be heaven if we made it such. If choices must be made, they might as well be made gladly. So there. And with him there would be a great, evolving, intellectual dignity to life. I am sure of it. I can walk tall and proud beside him in my body and in my mind. How will it work out? I don't know. In one year, two years, I will look back at the blind-alleys I wander in now and smile and think: My! how inevitable this past seems now that was once upon a time my very uncertain future!
--The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 161, 22 January 1953
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lovingsylvia · 5 months
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“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 25, 1950
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lovingsylvia · 5 months
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HAPPY 91st BIRTHDAY, my dearest Sylvia! ♥ RIP!
(27 October 1932, Boston, USA – 11 February 1963, London, UK)
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"Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?"
--The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 40, 1951
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Photo: Sylvia Plath reading "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" in The New Yorker, August 1958, Northampton, Massachusetts
via https://www.librarything.com/profile/SylviaPlathLibrary
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