Sylvia Plath: 10 quotes on her birthday

Sylvia Plath, American poet, novelist, and short story writer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts on Oct. 27, 1932. A straight-A student, she attended Smith College on a scholarship. Starting in 1950, Plath began publishing in national magazines and journals. During the summer of her third year, Plath was awarded a prestigious position as guest editor at Mademoiselle  magazine in New York. The experience did not turn out as she had hoped, and later that summer she attempted suicide. Plath returned to Smith six months later, completed an honors thesis, and graduated cum laude in 1955. She received a Fulbright scholarship to attend Newnham College, Cambridge University. In England, Plath met Ted Hughes, who would become a major English poet, and married him in 1956. In 1960, her first book "The Colossus"  was published. In 1962 Plath and Hughes separated and Plath moved to a small flat with her two children. There she struggled with mental illness but also wrote much of her most powerful poetry. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide at the age of 30. Two years after her death, "Ariel," a collection of some her last poems, was published, followed by "Crossing the Water" (1971) and "Winter Trees" ( 1971). Her "Collected Poems" was published later (1981), edited by Hughes. Today Plath is recognized as a leading confessional poet. 

1. Creativity

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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