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Sylvia Plath: Did you know...

Most of Sylvia Plath's letters are available in archives at Smith College, Indiana University and Emory University. And of course, many were printed in Letters Home.

Did you know that in the book Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters: The First Fifty Years, 1912-1962, they reprint a letter from Sylvia Plath to Poetry editor Henry Rago?

The letter was sent on 7 May 1957 from Cambridge, England, and in it, Plath thanks Rago for accepting the following poems, "The Snowman on the Moor", "Sow", Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats", and "On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad". These poems, her second batch of acceptances by this magazine, appeared in the July 1957 issue of Poetry (pictured here).

The editors of Dear Editor (Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young) also published Between the Lines: A History of Poetry in Letters, Part II: 1962-2002. Plath is referenced many times.

In a letter from John Berryman to Henry Rago, dated 22 July 1963, Berryman asks, "Have you seen, can you get rights to Sylvia Plath's final poems (Observer, 17 Febr.) and a biog'l piece on her? They are rare." Poetry did publish "Fever 103°", "Purdah", and "Eavesdropper" in their August 1963 issue.

Hayden Carruth, discussing Adrienne Rich in a letter dated 28 January, 1966, says, "I'll tell you one thing [Rich] could do perfectly: that's a retrospective piece on Sylvia Plath. She has studied Plath's poems with care and enthusiasm, and could write well about them, I'm almost certain..."

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