Essayists From The United States

"If the preservation of our freedom depends upon the courts then we are, indeed, lost, for in the long run neither courts nor Constitution can save us from our own errors, follies, or wickedness."

"This approach emphasizes what was once familiar enough to all Americans—and what we are now in danger of forgetting—that government derives its power from men; that rights of life and liberty are inalienable; that these rights are not something that government graciously confers upon men, but things no government can take away from men."

"Freedom in not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."

"Independence was an act of revolution; republicanism was something new under the sun; the federal system was a vast experimental laboratory. Physically Americans were pioneers; in the realm of social and economic institutions, too, their tradition has been one of pioneering. From the beginning, intellectual and spiritual diversity have been as characteristic of America as racial and linguistic. The most distinctively American philosophies have been transcendentalism — which is the philosophy of the Higher Law and pragmatism — which is the philosophy of experimentation and pluralism. These two principles are the very core of Americanism: the principle of the Higher Law, or of obedience to the dictates of conscience rather than of statutes, and the principle of pragmatism, or the rejection of a single good and of the notion of a finished universe. From the beginning Americans have known that there were new worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered. Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism."

"The American people have a stake in the maintenance of the most thorough-going inquisition into American institutions. They have a stake in nonconformity, for they know that the American genius is nonconformist."

"Who are those who are really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. Those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who press for special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who would exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war."

"Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.""

"What is the new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is — the political institutions, the social relationships, the economic practices. It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine, or public housing, or into the wisdom or validity of our foreign policy. It regards as particularly heinous any challenge to what is called "the system of private enterprise," identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete."

"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."

"The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted."

"If government, or those in positions of power and authority, can silence criticism by the argument that such criticism might be misunderstood somewhere, there is an end to all criticism, and perhaps an end to our kind of political system. For men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."

"The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought."

"With the Sedition and Espionage Acts … the "red hysteria" of the Twenties, the Alien Registration Act of 1940, the loyalty tests and purges of the mid-Forties, the establishment of un-American Activities Committees, intolerance received, as it were, the stamp of official approval. Loyalty was identified with conformity, and the American genius, which had been experimental and even rebellious, was required to conform to a pattern."

"In the 80s, Plath became a kind of feminist symbol of a victim, of what men can do to women; and the torment she endured is certainly part of the fascination for some. Not just in her life, or in her poetry, but after her death - since she was still legally married to Hughes, he inherited the Plath estate and was either careless with her work or protective of others' (and his own) feelings, depending on your view. He rearranged Plath's order of the poems in Ariel, for example, and added some of her bleakest at the end, such as Edge, which begins: "The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Plath's order, on the other hand, was more hopeful - it began with the word "love" and ended with "spring". Hughes burned Plath's last journal, "lost" another, similarly "lost" an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers should not be released until 2013. Her friends say that the victim image foisted on to Plath in the 80s never really fitted the woman, that Hughes was madly in love with her (as his near-death publication of Birthday Letters showed), and that she and Hughes in fact had an unusually equal relationship; but that is not to deny that being a woman and a writer in the 50s was difficult."

"With the bravado and despair of a young person, she tore apart the elegant poetic forms of the 1950s, and, using the raw language of everyday speech, she gave voice to the storms that raged inside her, thus freeing herself from the nightmarish visions that had long tormented her. In her novel The Bell Jar, she leads us into the dark corridors of the inner hell that led to her mental breakdown and brought her to the brink of her first attempt at suicide. It is a cruel, stifling world, whose black gates carry the inscription "no exit." Plath took the fact that she was the daughter of parents of German origin as the symbolic definition of her life. It was a fact that could neither be denied nor changed. In her poems, she called the father whom she loved, and who died when she was a child, a Nazi bastard. She, the Aryan child of the postwar generation, reimagined herself as symbolically Jewish, estranged, persecuted, rejected, and condemned."

"There is a tendency to see this mother-daughter relationship as the source of Sylvia Plath's early suicide attempt, her relentless perfectionism and obsession with "greatness." Yet the preface to Letters Home reveals a remarkable woman, a true survivor; it was Plath's father who set the example of self-destructiveness. The letters are far from complete and until many more materials are released, efforts to write Plath biography and criticism are questionable at best. But throughout runs her need to lay in her mother's lap, as it were, poems and prizes, books and babies, the longing for her mother when she is about to give birth, the effort to let Aurelia Plath know that her struggles and sacrifices to rear her daughter had been vindicated. In the last letters Sylvia seems to be trying to shield herself and Aurelia, an ocean away, from the pain of that "psychic osmosis.""

"back in those times, even though women were all infected with a yearning for a wild freedom, they continued outwardly to rub SOS on porcelain, using caustic cleansers, staying, as Sylvia Plath put it, "tied to their Bendix washing machines." There they washed and rinsed their clothes in water too hot for human touch and dreamed of a different world. When the instincts are injured, humans will "normalize" assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men. The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air."

"Like piranhas devouring their prey, Plath's thoughts rush, churn, thresh -- there is sheer demonic energy here, exhausting to observe and suggesting that Plath's primary motive for suicide might have been the extinguishing of this piranha-voice."

"Plath is an indefatigable graphomaniac who could write as fervently of colds, fevers, nausea, cramps and nosepicking as of an idyllic honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain; she is an inspired hater, and thrills to malicious descriptions of long-forgotten, nameless individuals whose bad luck it was to live near her, or to have met her socially. Yet Plath was always a severe critic of her real work, and considered the journal a place in which she could reveal herself without the strictures of art."

"The confessional poets like [Sylvia] Plath, whom I read later when they started calling me confessional, most of their stuff seemed contrived to me and not as greatly honest as it was touted to be."

"And yet when we think of Plath's death at dawn in an indifferent London it is homely Massachusetts that somehow comes back into view. The idea of death far away from home has a special pathos; embedded in it is the fantasy that the foreign place contributed to the death, perhaps was even the cause of it. Foreignness is threatening, dangerous: if only he or she had stayed home and not drunk that water, not taken that ancient bus over the pass, never ventured into that evil café."

"I believe that the consciousness from which creativity comes is this intensity of focus that is the result of practice. Sylvia Plath wrote exercise poems. Writing poetry is itself a form of exercise, a discipline as much as it is a calling and an art. And a discipline always asks for exercise."

"Long after I had been reading her work I came across the recording of some of her poems she made in England not long before she died. I have never before learned anything from a poetry reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Applicant," "Fever 103°"—were "beautifully" read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!""

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."

"I was rereading Plath the other day and she is a really an extremely fine, clever poet. In fact, I think Plath has turned out to be a much better poet than Hughes ever was. Of course he won all the prizes, and his name is on the stones in Poet’s Corner and OK, he’s pretty good, but not that good, whereas she gets better and better. ... Her early stuff wasn’t very good, but the poems after she left him – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she threw him out – were extraordinary. It’s funny when I reflect on back then, there were these two young poets I really liked, but at some point in those last few years, something shifted for her. What had happened was that Ted had gone on doing what he knew how to do, in a kind of slightly automatic way, whereas Sylvia had that one extraordinary year where she wrote non-stop. At that point she shot ahead."

"The abstract kills, the concrete saves."

"I desire the things which will destroy me in the end."

"Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him."

"I am made, crudely, for success."

"I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it."

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing."

"If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time."

"Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way."

"The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain."

"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start."

"It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation."

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time."

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."

"Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like."

"You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacingThrough the uncut grass on the elm's hill. It is something to own a pheasant, Or just to be visited at all.I am not mystical: it isn't As if I thought it had a spirit. It is simply in its element.That gives it a kingliness, a right."

"I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off."

"Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish."

"These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, Their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people It wasn't for any lack of mother-love."

"These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths Beating and beating at an intractable metal."

"Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes travelling Off from the centre like horses."

"The woman is perfected Her deadBody wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessityFlows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bareFeet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each littlePitcher of milk, now empty. She has foldedThem back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the gardenStiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag."

"The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it."

"Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children."

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