The following is from a 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr. This interview would have been a year before she committed suicide. Sylvia Plath killed herself six months after she separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. It was a year after the birth of her second child and just after The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
ORR: Do your poems tend now to come out of books rather than out of your own life?
PLATH: No, no : I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.
Words
Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes traveling Off from the center like horses.
The sap Wells like tears, like the Water striving To re-establish its mirror Over the rock
That drops and turns, A white skull, Eaten by weedy greens. Years later I Encounter them on the road---
Words dry and riderless, The indefatigable hoof-taps. While From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars Govern a life.