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Sylvia Plath said what? where?

In her March 2004 article, "Subject Sylvia" (Poetry, pp. 335-344), Meghan O'Rourke writes the following:
Plath took pains to invest her poems with a mythic severity, and in the weeks before she died spoke on the BBC about the need for the modern poet to draw on myth while making "the metaphor-moral ... intrinsic to the poem, working back and forth on itself, not expressed prosaically at the close, like the moral of a fable." (full text of article; link accessed 10 May 2013)

I am hoping that the power of social interneting can help to identify the source of this quote (above, in bold). "We" know Plath prepared a script of poems for the BBC circa 13/14 December 1962. These include poems such as "The Applicant," "Fog Sheep" ("Sheep in Fog"), "Lady Lazarus," "Ariel," "Death & Co.," "Nick and the Candlestick," "Letter in November," "Daddy," "Fever 103˚," "The Bee Meeting," "The Arrival of the Bee Box," and "Wintering."  However, the text does not appear in that script. The full-text of these poems and introductions appears in the several different places: the Plath Collection at Smith College, the Alvarez papers in the British Library, and some were printed in Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004).

Plath also reviewed, on 10 January 1963, Donald Hall's anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Smith College holds a typescript of this and the audio was released in the 2010 British Library CD The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath. The text also does not appear either in this recorded program or in the typescript I have seen (keeping in mind there might be an alternate typescript out there).

So, my question for the faithful, resourceful readers of this blog is: Do you know from where this quote comes?
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Comments

  1. Melanie Smith11 May, 2013 09:03

    Is Miss O'Rourke contactable to confirm her source material? I would be interested in where it is from, and if a definite Plath quote an interesting addition to her writing on her work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg11 May, 2013 13:29

    Melanie,

    Tried that. However it didn't yield any results. I'm surprised that a journal as reputable as Poetry seems to be wouldn't have either wanted or required citations...

    pks

    ReplyDelete
  3. suki12 May, 2013 06:49

    Hi Peter
    I tried the links

    http://dancingteahouse-poetry.com/Archives/viewtopic.php?t=4275&sid=f28383099a39abcb62519e34e8776a00


    For where the quote seemed to come from, bu the links don't seem to work....

    ReplyDelete
  4. suki13 May, 2013 04:02

    Hi Peter
    It seems to be self referential
    http://www.scribd.com/doc/135390996/C-Plath-A-Confessional-Poet

    ReplyDelete
  5. Peter K Steinberg13 May, 2013 11:53

    Score! I found it! It IS a Plath quote but NOT from something she wrote in 1962/1963 for the BBC. Sweet. What a relief. Will blog post about it later.

    pks

    ReplyDelete

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