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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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