Bulk Sylvia Plath in The New Yorker

Sylvia Plath was ecstatic when Poetry accepted six of her recent poems in October 1956. She wrote to Ted Hughes, "POETRY has accepted SIX of my poems!!!!!!!!!! Like we dreamed of. Didn't I say the Fulbright would start the trigger?" (Letters, Vol I, p 1292). It was the largest batch of her poems, to date, that were accepted; they appeared in the January 1957 issue. Another four poems followed in July 1957.

Plath's dream of being in The New Yorker is well known; her first acceptance was in June 1958 when the magazine took "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" and "Nocturne" (published as "Night Walk" and then "Hardcastle Crags".)

The magazine regularly accepted her work after she broke through. But they did not publish them all in a necessarily timely fashion. In her life, she saw nine of her poems in their "queer wobbly" font. After her death, they printed seven poems in their 3 August 1963 issue.

Hughes published "Gigolo" in 1970, and then, in time for his volumes of her poems in 1971/1972 (Crossing the Water and Winter Trees), he placed six poems (which the magazine had more than likely rejected) in the 6 March 1971 issue ("The Babysitters", "Pheasant", "The Courage of Shutting-Up", "Apprehensions", "For a Fatherless Son", and "By Candlelight").

That was the last time Plath was in The New Yorker until the early 1990s, when six of her poems appeared alongside Janet Malcom's The Silent Woman in their double 23 & 30 August 1993 number. The poems that were printed were "Medusa", "Letter in November", "Tulips", "The Rabbit Catcher", "Death & Co.", and "Edge". "Tulips" was a re-print; Plath saw in printed in the spring of 1962.

I recently saw a copy of the 1993 issue and learned of these poems appearing in print. See all of Plath's publications over at A celebration, this is.

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All links accessed 29 May 2022.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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