Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being

In the old romance of the artist, any person who has the temerity to spend a season in hell risks not getting out alive or coming back psychically damaged. The heroic avant-gardism of French literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries furnishes a memorable pantheon of artists who fail to survive their trips to hell. Still, there

how pain could be portrayed, and how it could be endured.

Even that repeated verb—conquer—evokes the unrealistic expectation of life as a series of culminating, definitive victories. Certainly, in her mind, bouts of depression are proof that she hasn’t won. She hates the process, has no patience for it, and is disgusted with herself for not getting to the end more quickly.