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Selected Poems

by Sylvia Plath · 1981

This selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry - chosen by Ted Hughes - shows Plath to be a major poet of the 20th century.

7 quotes ★ 4.25 (51,689) Literature

Quotes from the Book

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.
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Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses.
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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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I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
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Two Lovers And A Beachcomber By The Real Sea" Cold and final, the imagination Shuts down its fabled summer house; Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation Dwindles in the hour-glass. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair Tangling in the tide's green fall Now fold their wings like bats and disappear Into the attic of the skull. We are not what we might be; what we are Outlaws all extrapolation Beyond the interval of now and here: White whales are gone with the white ocean. A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack Of kaleidoscope shells Probing fractured Venus with a stick Under a tent of taunting gulls. No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone That chucks in backtrack of the wave; Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on, A grain of sand is all we have. Water will run by; the actual sun Will scrupulously rise and set; No little man lives in the exacting moon And that is that, is that, is that. Sylvia Plath, Mademoiselle, August 1955.
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People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
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People or stars Regards me sadly, I disappoint them.
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About Sylvia Plath

We have collected 222 quotes from 9 books by Sylvia Plath on BookQuoters.

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About the book

This selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry - chosen by Ted Hughes - shows Plath to be a major poet of the 20th century.

Book details

First published
1981
Goodreads rating
4.25 (52k ratings)

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