Sylvia Plath Collections: Letters to Kenneth Allott

There were some letters referred to in this morning's blog post that I thought it might be nice to write a bit more about.

Sylvia Plath wrote two letters to Kenneth Allott which are housed by the Syndey Jones Library at the University of Liverpool. When in the midst of working on the paper that I gave for the Sylvia Plath Society's conference in March (YouTube), I found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole which led to their being located. Naturally I wish they could have been included in volume II of the Letters of Sylvia Plath.

The letters date from 1 and 6 January 1961. In the first letter, written almost immediately upon return from the terrible visit to Yorkshire, Plath gives permission for Allott to reprint "Frog Autumn" and "Metaphors" in his anthology, Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse 1918–60, 2nd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, pp. 388–90), and provides some biographical details about herself. The second letter written just five days later is about Ted Hughes' "Otter", her own reading of Ransom as a poet she admired, and giving some biographical details about her husband.

The following are about Plath from Allott's anthology:

All links accessed 12 June 2022.

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