In the same vein, Sylvia Plath diverted the very essence of her agony, pain, and overwhelming shame into her art and penned it down raw, naked, and often bloodcurdling. Plath’s poetry and her novel The Bell Jar reflect a self-dissolution under a crushing weight of social expectations combined with mental illness and personal failure. Still, in... See more

So for Plath, suicide became, it seems, the Stoic way out. At a breaking point, anticipating a confinement that would destroy the very conditions of her creativity, she decided that ending her own life seemed not merely a viable option, but a reasonable one—a conclusion very much at odds with a psychiatric consensus that sees all suicidal ideation... See more

To be an artist is to live suspended above the abyss between recognition and artistic value, never quite knowing whether your art will land on either bank, or straddle both, or be swallowed by the fathomless pit of obscurity. We never know how our work stirs another mind or touches another heart, how it tenons into the mortise of the world. We

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