Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath's "Evolution"

Recently I was browsing through ABEbooks.com and saw something that nearly stopped my heart: a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Evolution" that appeared in a periodical called Experiment Magazine. The bookseller description reads:
Chicago, 1950. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Very good in original wrappers with light wear. Early, perhaps the third, appearance of Plath in print. Uncommon and, to the best of our knowledge, unrecorded. Bookseller Inventory # b31364. $750.
I wrote to Clayton Fine Books of Shepherdstown, WV, who has a great collection of Sylvia Plath books available to begin with, and received a reply very quickly from Cameron Northouse (who co-authored Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide with Thomas P. Walsh in 1974, which at the time was the first full-length bibliography published on Plath). Northouse found the periodical in Maine: a very lucky find. And considering that it was a previously unrecorded publication of a poem that has been all but lost to history and that it is undoubtedly a very scarce object now: the $750 price tag does not seem too steep. Though it is about $740 more than I can afford. (FYI: Christmas is coming, I accept gifts.)

Experiment
was published out of Roosevelt College in Chicago, Illinois. This particular issue is number 4 and came out in December 1950. You might be doing the math: Sylvia Plath + Chicago + 1950 = ? There are two possible answers, but one is I think clearly more likely than the other: Eddie Cohen.

My initial feeling was that "Eddie Cohen had this published unbeknownst to Plath". However, if I was betting myself then I lost as a little research uncovered some information about this. Plath sent this poem, along with two others ("Bitter Strawberries" and "Kitchen Interlude"), in late August or very early September 1950. "Bitter Strawberries" had been published already in the Christian Science Monitor on 11 August. Cohen remarked in his letter dated 2 September that he liked "Evolution" the best out of these three; and then in a letter written on 15 September, Cohen asks if he can submit it on her behalf to Experiment. Cohen's own piece "So Proudly We Hailed" appears in the issue just after Plath's poem, on page 9. Cohen's letters to Plath are held in Plath mss II at the Lilly Library. Neither "Kitchen Interlude" nor "Evolution" are listed in Plath's Collected Poems, in the section called "Uncollected Juvenilia: A complete list of poems composed before 1956" (pages 339-342 in the U.S. First edition).

Clayton Fine Books' description says that it is perhaps the third time Plath was in print. But it depends upon what you consider in print because according to Stephen Tabor's Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography (1988), this would have been at least Plath's 23rd publication (and even still, Tabor did not count her several published art works and other appearances, at least one of them anonymously, in his bibliography). Early: yes. Third: depends upon your criteria.

After having learned that Experiment was published through Roosevelt College (now Roosevelt University) I researched a bit on this and found that the Archives department at the college held some of these issues in their Pamphlet Collection. I wrote to Laura Mills, the University Archivist there, to see if this issue was one of the ones they held. The answer was yes, and she provided kindly jpg's of the poem and cover (see above left). It was amazing to see a previously unknown poem and to read it. The experience was precious and deeply emotional. It is, I think, a phenomenal poem.

"Evolution"reminded Eddie Cohen of an Abner Dean cartoon entitled "The people at the next table are all idiots" (see below) and he said the more he read it the more he liked it. However, I do not see anything in Dean's cartoon that remotely connects it to Plath's "Evolution".


Sylvia Plath's "Evolution" is one stanza, comprised of 33 lines. There is no consistent rhyme scheme and the lines are of varied syllable length. The poem begins with the speaker observing "Four blue reindeer on a yellow field" and are in the form of a square; the poem seems to me like the speaker is looking at a window-shop display, a diorama, or possibly a carousel as there is a "blur of feet and arms / Of people in another aisle" (8). She then lets her imagination wonder into the realm of fantasy, which reminds me of her brilliant short story "Sunday at the Mintons". Though clearly an early poem, based not only on its publication in 1950 but also the wording Plath uses, the poem does have certain elements of language and imagery that would later go into poems like "Whiteness I remember" and "Ariel" where the speaker's of those poems merge and blend with an animal (a horse) into one being. For example, she writes "I feel the warmth of him / Crawl through my knees ... / and we together" (8). In "Whiteness I Remember", the speaker sits with the "First horse under me ... / I hung on his neck" and in "Ariel", we have this matured image: "How one we grow... / I unpeel— ... / at one with the drive" (Collected Poems 102, 239). The poem has a erotic or sexual feel to it, which might be the thing that Eddie Cohen was most attracted to it -- which might be the reason Plath sent the poem in the first place -- for as we know he was smitten with Plath from the get-go.

Lastly, I think… In addition to the copy at Clayton Fine Books and the actual magazine at held by Roosevelt University, a third copy of “Evolution” is held in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. The Mortimer Rare Book Room holds, however, only photocopies of the cover, Table of Contents, and poem. The copies were a 2 December 1998 gift of Martin G. Pomper (whose father, David, was editor-in-chief of the magazine).

(This has nothing to do with anything, but seeing as I mentioned "Whiteness I Remember" and "Ariel" above, I think it might be a timely to mention a very good new article published recently by Georg Noffke: "'That Gallop Was Practice': A Horse Ride as Practice Run for Things to Come in Sylvia Plath's 'Whiteness I Remember' and Ted Hughes's 'Sam'." English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies Volume 30, Issue 2, 2013: pp. 6-20.)

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last