Just a small post today. Sylvia Plath had two poems published in Texas Quarterly : "Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" and "Witch Burning". Both poems appeared in specially themed issues on Britain and largely featured British writers. Which is bizarre as Plath was American (her way of talk was an "American way of talk"…), both poems were written in Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, as parts of her sequence "Poem for a Birthday" in the Fall of 1959. However, Ted Hughes figures prominently in the issue, so she must have been lumped in with him.   In the " Texas Quarterly records", held at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, there is just one typescript that a kind archivist searched for me (us!) and found: "Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" which appeared in the Winter 1960 issue. Ted Hughes' poem "Lines to a Newborn Baby" and his story "The Caning" also appeared in the Winter 1960 issue. One...

The archives of the Kenyon Review ( journal website ), held by Greenslade Special Collections and Archives of the Olin Library at Kenyon College, contains a small amount of Sylvia Plath materials. These include two letters and two typescript poems. The letters are addressed to the  Kenyon Review editor Robie Macauley ( obituary ) and are dated 28 November 1959 and 5 May 1960. The typescript poems are "The Bee-Keeper's Daughter" and "The Colossus." These two poems appeared in the Autumn 1960 issue. The first letter from 28 November 1959 expresses delight at the acceptance of these two poems, and gives a brief biographical sketch. Plath mentions graduating from Smith College and her Fulbright to Cambridge University; and lists the following periodicals in which her poetry has previously appeared: Atlantic Monthly , Harper's , The Hudson Review , The New Yorker , The Partisan Review , Poetry (Chicago), and The Sewanee Review . Plath, mere weeks from relo...

In the J Kerker Quinn papers in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign , there is a mini treasure trove of Sylvia Plath archival materials. Quinn was the editor of the journal Accent , which published two poems ("Recantation" and "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives") by Plath in their Autumn 1957 issue. In the Quinn papers there are two undated letters from Plath to the Poetry Editor; five typescript poems ("The Eye-Mote"; "The Thin People"; "Landowners"; "Maudlin"; and "Green Rock, Winthrop Bay"); and a typescript of her short story "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams". Additional materials in the papers include reader report comments on Plath's submissions. The undated letters from Plath can be roughly dated to circa 5 April 1957 and 1 July 1959. This is based on the date received that was marked down on the reader reports for Accent . The 1957 lette...

The Roy Davids' Collection ( catalog description ) auction held by Bonhams earlier this year featured wonderful Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and even Assia Wevill materials. The prices realized for the documents was quite substantial. I was curious at the time where they would end up… And now we partially know. Several of the auctioned items are now held by Emory University in Atlanta in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library (MARBL) in the Stuart Rose Literary Collection ( permalink ). This is a fitting place for these materials as Emory holds a massive collection of Ted Hughes papers already. The collection features a substantial sub-series of Sylvia Plath materials (series 3), and in addition there are smaller collections, including  Letters to Assia Wevill , among others. The following are now available for research use with no stated restrictions on access: Box 1 Folder 10: Hughes, Ted, "The Evolution of Sheep in the Fog," by Sylvia Plath, 7 working drafts, cir...

Recently I was browsing through ABEbooks.com and saw something that nearly stopped my heart: a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Evolution" that appeared in a periodical called Experiment Magazine . The bookseller description reads: Chicago, 1950. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Very good in original wrappers with light wear. Early, perhaps the third, appearance of Plath in print. Uncommon and, to the best of our knowledge, unrecorded. Bookseller Inventory # b31364. $750. I wrote to Clayton Fine Books of Shepherdstown, WV, who has a great collection of Sylvia Plath books available to begin with, and received a reply very quickly from Cameron Northouse (who co-authored Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide  with Thomas P. Walsh in 1974, which at the time was the first full-length bibliography published on Plath). Northouse found the periodical in Maine: a very lucky find. And considering that it was a previously unrecorded publication of a poe...

Reading Carrie Smith's wonderful essay "Illustration and ekphrasis: the working drafts of Ted Hughes's Cave Birds " in The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (edited by Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead , Ashgate, September 2013) got me thinking about Plath's own ekphrasis-experience with collaborating with a Baskin. The British Library holds a very important collection of Sylvia Plath letters in the Ted Hughes & Leonard Baskin collection (known as Hughes-Baskin Papers). The letters from Plath range in date from circa 1958-1962 and it was in reading these letters on a visit to the British Library  last March that I learned (or, re-learned if I knew and forgot) about Plath's attempt to write a poem based on the work of Esther and Leonard Baskin. Of course there is Plath's poem "Sculptor" which was dedicated to Leonard Baskin, but that was not something Plath did in collaboration with him. In late 1958 and early...