Sylvia Plath's "Sheep in Fog" & Ted Hughes on the poem

"There's never been a poetry sale like it, and I'm sure there won't be another" (Roy Davids)

This is to let you know that I am selling my poetry collection, forty years in the making, in 526 lots at Bonhams in London on 10 April (A-K) and 8 May (L-Y) this year. The sale comprises both poetical manuscripts (about 450) and portraits of poets (about 170). There will be a two volume catalogue.

The highlights among the manuscripts include: T.S.Eliot, 'The Journey of the Magi'; Sylvia Plath, 'Sheep in Fog'; Auden, 'Stop all the clocks'; Keats, part of the draft of 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'; Gerard Manley Hopkins, a draft of 'Binsey Poplars'; Ted Hughes, 'The Thought-Fox'; Rudyard Kipling, 'Recessional'; Robert Lowell, 'Fall 1961'; Siegfried Sassoon, poems from the First World War and the 1920s (including 50 unpublished poems); Christina Rossetti, 'Remember me when I have gone away'; Edward Thomas, 'Cock Crow'; Alexander Pope, part of 'The Pastorals'; S.T. Coleridge. 'The Dark Ladie'; Yeats. 'Are you content?'; A.E. Housman, draft of 'Epitaph on An Army of Mercenaries'; Tennyson, 'The Daisy', 'Break, break, break', 'To the Queen' and 'The Eagle'; Hardy, 'In Time of the Breaking of Nations', John Betjeman 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the the Cadogan Hotel'; Walt Whitman (section of Leaves of Grass).

Among other manuscripts are poems by Charlottë Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Walter Scott, Burns, Byron, Peacock, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, D.G. Rossetti, the Brownings, Clough, Cowper, Heaney, Larkin and John Crowe Ransom.

The portraits include an important contemporary pastel of Jonathan Swift; an unknown portrait of Landor; oil portraits of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy and Edward Thomas; a massive bust of Matthew Arnold; fine photographs of Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Tennyson, Kipling, Eliot, Auden, Betjeman, Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Yeats.

Roy Davids

The contact at Bonhams is Simon Roberts.