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“Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

March 28, 1941 - Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter.

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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: English covers

source

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Sylvia Plath reads her poem titled: “November Graveyard" (x)

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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Anne Sexton, Transformations; “Red Riding Hood.”

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Anna Akhmatova, from “White Flock” (1914)

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“Where does this tenderness come from? And what will I do with it? Young stranger, poet, wandering through town, you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from ‘Where does such tenderness come from?’ trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine.

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Mary Oliver reciting her poem titled “I Have Decided,”

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence.

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Sylvia Plath feeding a deer, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada, July 1959 

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Planetarium by Adrienne Rich

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Anna Akhmatova (tr. Jane Kenyon), Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova

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In the Forest via Gustave Courbet

Size: 106.1x85.1 cm Medium: oil, canvas

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“…the sweetness of her spirit and the alacrity of her forbidden, strange intelligence,”

— June Jordan, from Some of us did not die: New & Selected Essays; “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,”

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Adrienne Rich, Later Poems: Selected and New (1971-2012)

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“Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors,” Richard Siken.

[ID: You’d break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells.]

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Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest, Sylvia Plath

[ID: ‘In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now : Gnaws me through.’]

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Mary Oliver, “I don’t want to live a small life”, Red Bird