Bleerb buhb Lilly gungdsr*#@ Plath a09jdnjh!!! Flidpo finger breaking slitherbeck!
What a week! This morning I continued works through Box 7a, reading poems listed (or not) and uncollected in Collected Poems. Most of these works were written before 1955, some contain edit suggestions by professors, annotations by her mother, and so on. Her development from those poems in the 1940s to those written at Smith is so wonderful to see. As it stands if you read Collected Poems, you kind of just jump right into the middle - or even well past the middle. But, working through the poems alphabetically as one does in an archive, the years dissolve away and it's just Plath. Plath being Plath. A new collected poems that goes back to at least 1950 -to bring the poems more in line with the Journals, Stories, and Letters - would be great. However, as not all copies are dated sometimes it would be quite difficult to place some of them. But the right person or people I feel could figure something out. For example, starting around 1947, Plath's poetry started using ;'s to end lines moreso than before - and after her suicide attempt in 1953, a lot of the poetry was lowercase (to begin lines). One thing that was always there was use of exclamation (!) and the em dash (---) to end a line. Just think about those Ariel poems with their heavy use of both --- and !
Once this was done I called for Ted Hughes mss II to read through the letters Hughes and Plath wrote to Hughes' brother Gerald in Australia. And, in the last half hour the sap in me called the Lameyer mss. to see the color photographs and slides of Plath. These are so lovely and wonderful (the cover of Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive uses one of these pictures) - and the first paper back of Alexander's Rough Magic uses another (the one of Plath up against a tree).
This was a truly great week for the projects I'm working on, made possible by the the Lilly Library's Helm Visiting Fellowship and the support of this blogs readers. If I can quantify for you the result of these five and a half days, I took 149 pages of notes: that's 27.09 pages of notes per day or 3 pages per hour. I've got my work cut out for me once I get back home with regards to hunting through microfilm for full citations for clippings. Updating Plath's library on LibraryThing will be another project that I can work on more leisurely from home. But already this week I've added a title and information to some of the books so keep an eye out! Please excuse whilst I take some time off!
What a week! This morning I continued works through Box 7a, reading poems listed (or not) and uncollected in Collected Poems. Most of these works were written before 1955, some contain edit suggestions by professors, annotations by her mother, and so on. Her development from those poems in the 1940s to those written at Smith is so wonderful to see. As it stands if you read Collected Poems, you kind of just jump right into the middle - or even well past the middle. But, working through the poems alphabetically as one does in an archive, the years dissolve away and it's just Plath. Plath being Plath. A new collected poems that goes back to at least 1950 -to bring the poems more in line with the Journals, Stories, and Letters - would be great. However, as not all copies are dated sometimes it would be quite difficult to place some of them. But the right person or people I feel could figure something out. For example, starting around 1947, Plath's poetry started using ;'s to end lines moreso than before - and after her suicide attempt in 1953, a lot of the poetry was lowercase (to begin lines). One thing that was always there was use of exclamation (!) and the em dash (---) to end a line. Just think about those Ariel poems with their heavy use of both --- and !
Once this was done I called for Ted Hughes mss II to read through the letters Hughes and Plath wrote to Hughes' brother Gerald in Australia. And, in the last half hour the sap in me called the Lameyer mss. to see the color photographs and slides of Plath. These are so lovely and wonderful (the cover of Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive uses one of these pictures) - and the first paper back of Alexander's Rough Magic uses another (the one of Plath up against a tree).
This was a truly great week for the projects I'm working on, made possible by the the Lilly Library's Helm Visiting Fellowship and the support of this blogs readers. If I can quantify for you the result of these five and a half days, I took 149 pages of notes: that's 27.09 pages of notes per day or 3 pages per hour. I've got my work cut out for me once I get back home with regards to hunting through microfilm for full citations for clippings. Updating Plath's library on LibraryThing will be another project that I can work on more leisurely from home. But already this week I've added a title and information to some of the books so keep an eye out! Please excuse whilst I take some time off!