Quotes from Heather Clark

Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized.

She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, "operatic" in her desires, a "Renaissance woman" molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.5 She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats's gongs and gyres as Frost's silences and snow.

BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don't be indifferent, don't be NOTHING.

I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,

She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.

This was a time when Movement poets such as Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis dominated the post-war British poetry scene. Luke would later describe the Movement as "an expression of logic rather than myth, 'classical,' and esteemed principally as an instrument of stability." Hughes felt similarly. He associated the Movement poems with 'the post-war mood of having had enough.

They were of her, but not her—a looking glass that reflected the possibility of what might or might not be, and she could not resist plumbing their depths as she sought to understand her own.

We cannot know for sure whether Plath's original order in "Ariel" was meant to suggest a narrative of recovery from anger, depression, and self-punishment. But her placement of "wintering" at the collection's end hints that she believed she was becoming more resilient, and that she may have began, before her own death, to forgive her father for dying.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities...One doesn't get prizes for this increasing awareness, which sometimes comes with an intensity indistinguishable from pain.

I love the thinginess of things.

He drew witches, wolves, and ghosts; she sketched landscapes and cottages.

Out in the radish fields, she did not have to impress, outthink, or outperform anyone.

Because Picasso could no longer imitate, he innovated. Plath does the same in "Daddy," her surreal poem of rupture.

Like her Joycean hero Stephen Dedalus, she was filled with "Icarian lust": she would seek out her destiny abroad, collect experience for her art, and stay in motion.10 Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. Plath spread her wings, over and over, at a time when women were not supposed to fly.

Yet Sylvia told others she was "daring to live the way most people dream of living when they are fifty: to sacrifice all for our ideal of a good life, not other people's cars & securities & 10 year leases.

I need so to love a person-be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up.

The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.