Sylvia Plath's Writer's Block

One of my favorite people in the world, Jett Whitehead of Jett W. Whitehead Rare Books, sent me a little Sylvia Plath Christmas present in the mail. It took a while to reach me, which is understandable. I was not sure I ever needed something like this before; but now that I have it, I can say safely it was something I was missing, truly...

It is a small block with prints on all six sides of Plath book covers (The Bell Jar, Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees), a photo of Plath (from 1952), and her beautiful signature. Jett included a note saying that he hopes it is the only writer's block I ever get. Could not agree more. The funny thing is I was just reading the other day an entry in Plath's journals about her feeling of writer's block during her Boston year.

Thank you, Jett!

Here is the block, which came with an official Poetry Pad of from Jett's office.

And, here is the block in use in my office:

All links accessed 7 January 2021.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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