Sylvia Plath's Valentine from Elly

I meant to post this back in February but it slipped through the cracks.

On Monday, 17 February 1958, Sylvia Plath recorded in her journal about receiving in the mail a homemade Valentine from her friend Elinor Friedman Klein. Plath wrote: "then a black & white valentine from Elly with a photo-montage of lovers, of three men behind barbwire at a Concentration Camp clipped from the Times from a review which I read about tortures & black trains bearing victims to the furnace" (330).

While it is not clear what the "photo-montage of lovers" might have been, that clipping of "three men behind barbwire at a Concentration Camp" came from the review "A Black Train Stuffed With Doom" by Frederic Morton about Jacob Presser's book Breaking Point (World Publishing). It appeared in the Book Review on 9 February 1958.

The etching was drawn by William Sharp, and appeared courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery. The etching was one of many of Sharp's used in the 1942 novel The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers.

The composition date for Plath's "The Thin People" is indeterminate. In her excellent Journey Towards Ariel, Nancy Hargrove lists this as a late 1957/early 1958 poem. Plath was receptive and sympathetic to works of art on paper, and so I wonder if "The Thin People" came before or after she read the review of the book and this prompt, for lack of a better word, from her friend?

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