Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath Anthologized

I recently learned (or rather was reminded) that two of Sylvia Plath's poems and a photograph of her were printed in an anthology in 1963, just a few months after her death. Two poems and a photo of Ted Hughes were included, too. This book and the poems are not listed in Stephen Tabor's Analytical Bibliography.

The book is The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963). It was edited by John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read and includes photographs by Rollie McKenna. Brinnin would have known McKenna for years as she famously photographed his Welsh buddy, the poet Dylan Thomas. And McKenna photographed Plath and Hughes in Boston sometime during the Boston year in 1958-1959. A review of the book, "Handsomest of Poetry Anthologies", appeared in the Boston Globe on 19 May 1963, next to the article "Anne Sexton Plans Tour of Europe: Commitment Necessary To Be Poet".


The two Hughes poems are "Hawk Roosting" and "View of a Pig".


The two Plath poems are "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" and "The Colossus".

I think it is great Plath was included. (And it possibly might have given her the smile of accomplishment that Adrienne Rich was not!) But I cannot help but wonder when the poems were selected for inclusion? Perhaps it was when Brinnin and Read visited Plath & Hughes at Court Green on 25 August 1962 (reported in Stevenson, see also Trinidad; during this visit offered Hughes a teaching position at the University of Connecticut. Plath refers to this visit and these men in some of the worksheets for "Death & Co.)". The thing that really floors me was that Plath's mini-biography includes the detail that she died by suicide.

It is always, always strange for me to recall that as poems like "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" and "The Colossus" were appearing in anthologies such as this, Plath has already moved so far beyond them. Remember, "Black Rook" was written in November 1956 and "The Colossus" in October 1959. By May 1963, Plath had died, obviously, but she was a full year removed from some of her most powerful verses such as "Three Women", "Elm" and "The Rabbit Catcher". This is not the only example. "Leaving Early" was published by London Magazine in August 1961 and then in Harper's in December 1962, just a few months before "The Arrival of the Bee Box" and "Wintering" in The Atlantic Monthly.

Because it is contemporary, here is the photo of the American poet W.S. Merwin that is in the book.


I like looking at the photographs of the poets (and reading their poems). Especially their photographs as many look just as Plath would have known them. Such as, for example, Merwin, Robert Bagg, Philip Booth, John Lehmann, Marianne Moore, Howard Moss (pretty sure they never met in person, but he was an important figure), Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck, among many others. E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound were not photographed; Cummings because he passed away in September 1962 when the book was still being compiled and Pound was in Italy doing what Ezra Pound did.

Ted Hughes' copy, which he received in May 1963, is held by Emory University. A copy is available to view via Archive.org. There was a second edition of the book published in 1970.


All links accessed 17-18 May 2018.

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