It may be that she was simply an extreme case, that many other poets' works nurse and analyse their roots as doggedly as hers do, but that she is distinguished by an unusually clear root system and an abnormally clear and clinically exact system of attending to it... Maybe her singularity derives from a feminine bee-line instinct for the real priority, for what truly matters - an instinct for nursing and repairing the damaged and threatened nucleus of the self and for starving every other aspect of her life in order to feed and strengthen that, and bring that to a safe delivery.

-Ted Hughes, 'Sylvia Plath and Her Journals'

Where [Hardy] differed from so many of his contemporaries was in the absoluteness, the literalness, with which he believed that not to be born was best...

when writing to Mrs Henniker about the fighting in South Africa, at a time when her husband was still on active service there, [he] allowed himself to remark: 'It is sad, or not, as you look at it, to think that 40,000 will have found their rest there. Could we ask them if they wish to wake up again, would they say Yes, do you think?'

-Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy
[quoted]

You all know that in the due course of time
If you continue scratching on a stone,
Little by little some image thereon
Will be engraven. Thus her friends went on
Comforting her so long, till in the end
She, with the help of hope and common sense,
Received the impress of their consolation,
Which loosened at long last her heavy sorrow:
She could not have endured such grief for ever.

-Chaucer, from "The Franklin's Tale" (trans. David Wright)