List poets more depressing and morbid than Sylvia Plath

List poets more depressing and morbid than Sylvia Plath.

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damn u got me user

Poe

Poe...is that it ?

Anne Sexton
Larkin is comparable

hmm. Eliot is similar. and i know his subject matter isn't the same, he doesn't write about suicide, etc., but he has a similar tone.

anyway plath is great, not just because of her romanticized bio, but Ariel is brilliant. people sometimes only know her as the author of the bell jar which is too bad.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

-Emily Dickinson writing from the room she never NEET chamber she never left.

thanks lad

I may end up reading ariel I have it bookmarked

I just got through listening to

archive.org/details/dickinson_poems_bm_librivox

earlier today and enjoyed it, I may look for some more of her work in audiobook but I doubt ill find more.

Michel Houellebecq

>Pourquoi ne pouvon-nous jamais
jamais
étre aimes?

fucking read "ariel" it's as brilliant as its hyped up to be. seriously. I don't even have energy to read as i'm very ill, but occasionally force myself to reread some of the poems in "ariel" because there's so much power/weight/grace in her work.

ty
ok I will

my diary desu

...

Legitimate question: what is it that people like Bloom find objectionable about Plath's poetry? She's pretty good for a 'feminist' poet

>editing the dashes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Levine_(poet)

ted hughes. he was better in every respect.... including being a dour cunt

the idea inherent in confessional poetry that the poet is expressing their authentic, innermost thoughts/feelings and not, in actual fact, putting on a performance??

maybe he was concerned for their mental well-being. Many confessional poets killed themselves.

I wrote a poem called "Robert Lowell has blood on his hands"

>im a misogynist and must stick to my guns even if they are wrong because cognitive dissonance

thank you

Too easy and I'm shocked no one mentioned him but Charles Baudelaire.

This is the saddening state of our board

She's just not that good.

Expecting everyone to read the same poets is ridiculous. Unless its Shakespeare, Homer, or the Raven, plenty of people that love poetry haven't read it.

gb2tumblr

hughes was a better poet. Plath never wrote anything as relentlessly bleak as his crow poems.....they just weren't about "muh feels" like plath's output

Philip larkin made me want to kill myself more than plath did. But he was witty with it

very nice thank you user

you know, at first, i was like, "someone preferring Hughes doesn't mean anything," but that dude was right.

"muh feels" isn't a valid criticism of anything

fuck me user

But that's the thing, he's probably one of the most well known and respected poets. Plath is a nobody outside the US, and for a board that takes pride in being as elitist and well versed as Veeky Forums can be, it just seems odd.
Mostly because it's rare someone reads contemporary works more than classics

i don't think plath's poetry is confessional, this is a retarded way to think of it. like i said earlier, just because she wrote an autobiographical novel, people think of her poetry in that context.

hughes has some good stuff but nowhere near plath's brilliance. Nothing about "ariel" is "muh feels" whoever says that is a brainlet.

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

"muh feels" wasn't criticism. I was merely pointing out the difference in subject matter using appropriate chantard vernacular.

>muh burds and burnt fox spirit-animal

Thomas Ligotti

now tell me how that poem is "confessional" or diaristic. and no just having the word "suicidal" or being partially in first person doesn't count.
the poem is full of vivid imagery and the enjambment is perfect. it's propulsive; intense. it's not "muh feels". it's both showing and telling, but mostly showing.

ok. i was overly defensive b/c relegating plath to tumblr status is unforgivable, whatever you think of hughes. both of them are obviously worth reading, anyway. they were both into grave's "the white goddess", pagan european myths, magic, etc.

thanks again. if there are any other poets similiar to him please post them

are you, you, or are you larping as dead Plath?

your answer with affect mine.

>".......and then my second wife gassed herself to death with an oven, except this time she took one of our kids with her. lol. I'm like a one man Auschwitz, motherfucker!"

First off, no one is asking you whether you "think" Plath's poetry is confessional. It is. The term is not derogatory, it's just meant to distinguish a certain wave of midcentury poets, most of whom were influenced by Robert Lowell. You know, Plath's fucking college teacher.

Second, equating confessional poetry with "muh feels" is nonsense. Plath's works are mostly not melodramatic dreck, sure, but that doesn't make them any less confessional. I mean, if you can't see right through to her tortured relationships to her father, Hughes, and her daughter on the Ariel poems, I mean, may God help you.

Thirdly, as much as I respect Plath, she was never anywhere near Hughes' level, not as a creator of sound and certainly not as a creator of mythic symbols. Within the twentieth century in English, the man is a solid top ten poet. Crow and The Hawk in the Rain alone blow every poem she ever wrote out of the water. I leave The Bell Jar out of it since that's another genre and it's actually a very good little midcentury ennui novel, which is no mean feat.

thank you

Dawg, Plath is better than Hughes, and I'm not sure I'd put either in top ten 20th century.

I was just about to post the same thing but got distracted

>grave's "the white goddess"
thank you

Plath is terrible. Read Poe.

The subjects of Plath's poems are more memorable- Arrival of the Beebox, Daddy, Tulips- but I agree Hughes was a better poet.

Hughes is a hundred times better than Plath, are you kidding? Plath is a complete feminist meme and Hughes's mastery of the language and sound of poetry was unmatched. Plus the dude lived a hard life, and that's reflected better in his work. Mostly because he surrounded himself with crazy women like Plath.

haha, what?

I just got finished with a Film and Literature of War class, OP. I haven't read any of Plath's work yet, but I'll bet you Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, or Wilfred Owen can make the girl eat her liver.

it's clear that you're letting your ideological bias get in the way of aesthetic appreciation which is gay as hell. just because feminists adopted plath posthumously, because it seems like hughes was a dick to her and acted suspicious, doesn't mean she was a feminist poet. she shouldn't be reduced to that. discounting the bell jar, what of her work is at all feminist? it's way more personal than ideological. and she seemed to long for domesticity and traditional womanhood in a lot of ways. her poetry also is influenced by european classicist ideals, there's a case to be made for crypto-fascism, but not feminism. maybe just "daddy". but just b/c one poem has a message that could be interpreted as feminist doesn't mean she is a feminist poet. stop being a 'tard.

I meant it just as you said, she's only taken really seriously by hardcore feminists. If you want to talk about aesthetics, then Hughes has her beat solidly. It's what he excelled at.

that's not what i said. she's taken seriously by plenty of good writers and poets who aren't feminists. I'm just saying that she also has a feminist following.
>it's what he excelled at
lol nice critical view of hughes, all you can tell me is he excelled at "aesthetics"?

>away, civilitay
>day, eternitay

Hughes had a tin ear. They were both abysmal.

Who do you prefer?

thanks. ill check these poets out.

Anthropomorphism is cancer. Poets who do this suck dick.

>relentlessly bleak
>"muh feels" like plath's output
Ok user...ok
>I like da animals on da farm, dey go mooo and oinkk, and da crow goess weeee

>hughes was a better poet
>Plath never wrote anything as relentlessly bleak as his crow poems
>better poet
>relentlessly bleak
>was a better poet
>Plath never wrote anything as relentlessly bleak
>better poet?
>relentlessly bleak?
>check
>how good do you think that poet is?
>I dont know, how relentlessly bleak is their poetry?

>Stasis in darkness.
that one line is better than ted hughes entire output lmao

>Splits and passes, sister to
>The brown arc
>Of the neck I cannot catch,
>Nigger-eye
>Berries cast dark
>Hooks—
>Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
>Shadows.
>Something else
>Hauls me through air—
>Thighs, hair;
>Flakes from my heels.
>White
>Godiva, I unpeel—
>Dead hands, dead stringencies.
this is why Ted Hughes drove her to kill herself, he thought she was cucking him with a black man

every poem is confessional, people just make up these labels and words because they cannot actually write poetry but are semi interested so feel like they are contributing and doing something when they shuffle around poems and categories in front of other people:, oh, yes, hmm, that poem, yes, moi... oh that is this, and that is that, and this is this, yes, yes, that poem is not very good, I know all of this, this is all about me now and how much I know and think and how I can put these poems and labels on my coat like nascar sponsers

Post some excerpts of Ted Hughes Crow, Hawk, Rain, whatever, you think is some of his best

its called wit, congrats, you picked up on it

>Anthropomorphism is cancer. Poets who do this suck dick.
Blanket generalizations of the entirety of a poets work based on your opinion of a quality of one of their poems is cancer. People who do this suck dick

Lautréamont, Artaud, Baudelaire.
Face it guys, the french have the most fucked up poets.

noice

op here more will check these guys out ty

from The Hawk in the Rain

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the mooring—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays—

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

—Ted Hughes

from Crow

Apple Tragedy

So on the seventh day
The serpent rested,
God came up to him.
"I've invented a new game," he said.

The serpent stared in surprise
At this interloper.
But God said: "You see this apple?"
I squeeze it and look-cider."

The serpent had a good drink
And curled up into a question mark.
Adam drank and said: "Be my god."
Eve drank and opened her legs

And called to the cockeyed serpent
And gave him a wild time.
God ran and told Adam
Who in drunken rage tried to hang himself in the orchard.

The serpent tried to explain, crying "Stop"
But drink was splitting his syllable.
And Eve started screeching: "Rape! Rape!"
And stamping on his head.

Now whenever the snake appears she screeches
"Here it comes again! Help! O Help!"
Then Adam smashes a chair on his head,
And God says: "I am well pleased"

And everything goes to hell.

- Ted Hughes

youtube.com/watch?v=_Ml6UehFhG0

youtube.com/watch?v=s49p1K8bqK4

this is a bit repetitive to me
love this one but not sure how original it was at the time?

This is good, but bad. It would be hard to quantify this as having greater poetic value than Plaths posted in this thread and..(but..so..this is an example of his best work?) the flow and rhythm are stogey, clunky, trippy, beggineresque...maybe its for effect; but yes, I agree it is a cute little story, and some humorous little asides and remarks, and slap stick hehe's)

The Black Beast

Where is the Black Beast?
Crow, like an owl, swivelled his head.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow hid in its bed, to ambush it.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow sat in its chair, telling loud lies against the Black
Beast.
Where is it?
Crow shouted after midnight, pounding the wall with a
last.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow split his enemy’s skull to the pineal gland.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into
the brain of a dogfish.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow killed his brother and turned him inside out to stare
at his colour.
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow roasted the earth to a clinker, he charged into
space—
Where is the Black Beast?
The silences of space decamped, space flitted in every
direction—
Where is the Black Beast?
Crow flailed immensely through the vacuum, he
screeched after the disappearing stars—
Where is it? Where is the Black Beast?

-Ted Hughes

it's a line that i feel like frames all of her work, which is cool

ok its good

...

Bloom has admitted to some of her potential, but he doesn't think she achieved much.

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——
To Paradise.

I'm really surprised so many people prefer Hughs over Plath.. I admit I don't know Hughs stuff as well but that's only because I never got too much out of it. Anyone else feel like his shit is just too put on? Feels really forced and meticulous in a bad way.

These poets were mentioned ITT:

Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, Michel Houellebecq, Ted Hughes, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Ligotti, Comte de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud, Robert Graves was also mentioned.

if you want something depressing, try reading The City of Dreadful Night by James "B.V." Thomson

probably one of the most wallowingly pessimistic poems in the English language

found it, thanks

Robert Lowell & John Berryman should be added to the list. Add Dylan Thomas, too, just for good measure... and maybe even some Seamus Heaney.

That meme is being stolen, lad thanks

Happy new year everyone btw

happy new year

Frank Stanford

frank stanford seconded. i love his stuff, he's like the rimbaud of mississippi.

my friend worked at a publishing house that published his shit and got me a copy of his collected works. thank you, friend. well worth it. he did some unorthodox translations of a yukio mishima poem and other poems

How has nobody mentioned Manley Hopkins

This board doesn't read

Sidney Lanier was better at the same thing though

>now tell me how that poem is "confessional" or diaristic

The poem loosely follows Plath's attempted suicide and the life events that follow it. In 1953 she tried overdosing on sedatives, and was unconscious for 3 days before being found alive. In The Bell Jar she describes this experience an enveloping darkness in which she is only vaguely conscious and can hear but not understand the voices of her mother and doctors.

The "stasis in darkness" opener presumably refers to this suicide attempt. By the "child's cry" line, it's come full circle to her current life and struggle to balance personal identity with motherhood. The poem ends with a reemergence into suicidal ideation, which Plath was experiencing as she wrote Ariel and which eventually drove her to commit suicide in 1963.

Plath was a confessional poet as much as Sexton or anyone else from the period was. What set her apart was her tact, and the fact that many of her poems don't even seem confessional on their own.

Not 'morbid' but Celan is quite depressing.

>Pourquoi ne pouvons-nous jamais
>jamais
>étre aimes?
generic_teenager_poem_n°4506

Joe Bolton

Oh look the vagina card. What happened to this fucking website?

>the vagina card
that post was just calling out a lazy sexist, which is different than saying something is good because it was made by a woman (the actual vagina card)

Plath > Sexton >> Hughes

gerard was great, fairly inventive for its time, from carrion comfor 'lionlimb against me' dunno im paraphrasing from memory

No, that post attempted to conflate not liking le feminist folk hero with being sexist. Nothing in his post was sexist. Unless the 'C Word' triggers you, in which case please leave.

Someone has recs for depressing poets but in spanish?

...

duly noted thanks lit

thicc