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Meaning
This reads as a stark self-portrait of inner struggle. It can be taken to mean that mood and motion are being framed as a choice between engagement with life and withdrawal into suffering, even if that choice is painfully uneven. It lands in a period of isolation or pressure, when the speaker seems to be naming the cost of inaction.
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Who It Was Said To
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Historical Context
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Source
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Original Language & Translation
Originally said in English.
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About Sylvia Plath
American poet and author
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. She helped shape confessional poetry and is best known for work that brought private experience into sharp literary focus. Her books include The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel, and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1981 with previously unpublished work, and that collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, awarded to her posthumously.
More from Sylvia Plath (248 quotes) →More quotes by Sylvia Plath
- “You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.”Sylvia Plath
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- “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”Sylvia Plath
- “The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions a…”Sylvia Plath
Depression: more sayings
- “A night of crying has silenced me. This morning it seems the whole world is against me. I've never before fel…”Shaun Hick
- “One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not li…”Mindy Kaling
- “Mandy' came from grief and depression. I wanted this to be an outward volcanic expulsion of the emotion of my…”Panos Cosmatos
Explore Happiness
- “For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest…”Emma Donoghue
- “If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power t…”Eleonora Duse
- “I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even t…”Andre Dubus III
READ THE SOURCE
Books by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
2006
Ariel
1965
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
1975
The bed book
1976
Collected Poems
1981