Sylvia Plath: Did you know...

The two images to the below are of the last two stanzas in Sylvia Plath's poem "Point Shirley" which appeared in her first collection of poetry, The Colossus and other poems. The Colossus and other poems, like The Bell Jar, has three different first editions. There is the Heinemann edition of October 1960; the Knopf edition of May 1962; and the Faber edition of 1967. The monetary value of each declines with each subsequent publisher making the Heinemann both highly desirable and expensive, and the Faber edition less desirable and less expensive. Ariel, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and other later Plath books (excepting the abridged Journals) were exclusively published by Faber in England and Harper & Row (HarperCollins) in the America.

The top image is from the first Knopf edition; the bottom is from the first Faber edition. Can you find the difference?

The typographical error is almost unnoticeable. I've read the poem dozens of times but only just noticed it last night. Plath's own recording makes her intention clear. Tracy Brain and others have written on the typographical variations present in the individual collections and collected poems of Sylvia Plath. See Brain's The Other Sylvia Plath (Longman: 2001) and essay "Unstable Manuscripts" in Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive: essays on Sylvia Plath (University of Michigan Press: 2007)

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Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

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Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

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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...

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