Sylvia Plath's Loose Diary Items

The other day I was looking at some of my photographs from one of the Lilly Library's wonderful Sylvia Plath collections and I was instantly inspired to present some of the information to you in a blog post.

In Plath mss II, Box 7, 1949 loose items, there are a bounty of Plathian things that she once used in her daily or perhaps more ephemeral life. On the day I photographed the contents---a perk I had due to my editorial work on Plath's Letters, the contents were:

1. Typed on a small, blue sheet of paper: "An End" by Sara Teasdale, which ends "And summer will not come to me again". Plath famously used this as the title for her short story which was her first fictional piece in Seventeen magazine.

2. Record of Summer Dates for July and August 1949

3. Handwritten quote from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, "The Everlasting No":

"How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!"

4. A 14-paged handwritten diary from August 1949

5. Two typed poems by Dorothy Parker: "Indian Summer" and "Observation"

6. Typed poem "Silhouette" by Abbie Houston Evans

7. Handwritten, two-paged, loose diary entry beginning, "Tonight, as always, before going to bed..."

8. Aurelia Schober Plath's typed version of the previous diary entry

I hope some day some of you might be able to visit the Lilly Library to see this material first hand. But at least with all the authors mentioned above, one might be able to read what Sylvia Plath read.

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