Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath's "Sheep in Fog" & Ted Hughes on the poem

"There's never been a poetry sale like it, and I'm sure there won't be another" (Roy Davids)

This is to let you know that I am selling my poetry collection, forty years in the making, in 526 lots at Bonhams in London on 10 April (A-K) and 8 May (L-Y) this year. The sale comprises both poetical manuscripts (about 450) and portraits of poets (about 170). There will be a two volume catalogue.

The highlights among the manuscripts include: T.S.Eliot, 'The Journey of the Magi'; Sylvia Plath, 'Sheep in Fog'; Auden, 'Stop all the clocks'; Keats, part of the draft of 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'; Gerard Manley Hopkins, a draft of 'Binsey Poplars'; Ted Hughes, 'The Thought-Fox'; Rudyard Kipling, 'Recessional'; Robert Lowell, 'Fall 1961'; Siegfried Sassoon, poems from the First World War and the 1920s (including 50 unpublished poems); Christina Rossetti, 'Remember me when I have gone away'; Edward Thomas, 'Cock Crow'; Alexander Pope, part of 'The Pastorals'; S.T. Coleridge. 'The Dark Ladie'; Yeats. 'Are you content?'; A.E. Housman, draft of 'Epitaph on An Army of Mercenaries'; Tennyson, 'The Daisy', 'Break, break, break', 'To the Queen' and 'The Eagle'; Hardy, 'In Time of the Breaking of Nations', John Betjeman 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the the Cadogan Hotel'; Walt Whitman (section of Leaves of Grass).

Among other manuscripts are poems by Charlottë Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Walter Scott, Burns, Byron, Peacock, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, D.G. Rossetti, the Brownings, Clough, Cowper, Heaney, Larkin and John Crowe Ransom.

The portraits include an important contemporary pastel of Jonathan Swift; an unknown portrait of Landor; oil portraits of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy and Edward Thomas; a massive bust of Matthew Arnold; fine photographs of Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Tennyson, Kipling, Eliot, Auden, Betjeman, Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Yeats.

Roy Davids

The contact at Bonhams is Simon Roberts.

Popular posts from this blog

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'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...

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...