This is how Sylvia Plath saw the act of writing:
Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter.
(Quoted from page 289 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
For a brief biography of Sylvia Plath, click here. For images of or relating to Sylvia Plath, click here.
Comments