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Did you know...: Sylvia Plath on the Underground

On 28 January 1963 Sylvia Plath was hard at work. On that day she completed her "Landscape of Childhood" (later titled "Ocean 1212-W"). She may have also recently completed "Snow Blitz" and was hard at work on poems. She revised the ending of "Sheep in Fog" first composed about eight weeks earlier, and then wrote "The Munich Mannequins", "Totem", and "Child".

Did you know that "Child" was once featured at a "Poems on the Underground" in London? The program started in 1986.


In addition to being readable on the Tube, once upon a time, posters were sold for these, too. 
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  1. Amy Rea18 April, 2019 08:52

    I'd buy that poster. I love that poem. One of my favorites.

    ReplyDelete
  2. H. E. Riddleton20 April, 2019 17:24

    This is what needs to happen, so that others can love Sylvia as much as we do, plastering her about train stations and other public places heavily frequented, so that in the prosaic nature of the commute, one can glimpse at a higher world, a world of the poetic...

    Why is the Poems of the Underground not more widespread? I feel that something like this should be the effort of a Poet Laureate...

    "Stampede, stampede.
    The secret is out"

    Also, I did not know that Sylvia was writing prose at this time-- I knew she was writing Falcon Yard over the previous summer--- but, after Ted left, I thought her focus went fully to her poetry, in a passionate gust, to fixate the focus fully to herself... I guess this more widespread focus on her career as a writer alongside the curtain of extreme creativity she fell and rose under in these months allows her letters to her friends, to Martha, to Ruth Fainlight, to make more sense... She was planning on moving back to Boston once the divorce was finalized; she was going to assure her seat as the twentieth century American poetess... She had plans, but the world, in its cruelty, in its expenses... The world does not want dreamers... The sixties did not want women... No age wants a revolution... I hope to also possess her revolutionary ambition... I love her so much...

    Also, thank you so much, Peter K. Steinberg... I love Sylvia so much and you are my greatest resource on Sylvia, but I have always been too anxious to comment on here... I have taken something to relax my usual explosions of anxiety and I am able to comment, to tell you what your discoveries mean to me in my own penetrating desire to understand her... I hope that I am not oversharing, however, I can definitely tell that you understand this search for her...

    ReplyDelete

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