Sylvia Plath wrote her most famous villanelle on 21 February 1953 about Myron "Mike" Lotz, of Yale, whom she met over the Thanksgiving holiday in November 1952. I suspect many of us have been in that position before about a love interest; and in fact maybe some of you feel this degree of beautifully painful longing waiting for the next exciting Sylvia Plath Info Blog post? Right… Anyway, Plath sent the poem off to The New Yorker and Harper's . A typescript copy of "Mad Girl’s Love Song" held by Lilly Library, probably sent by Plath to her mother in her letter dated the same day of composition, includes the following note typed at the top: "this one had the honor of being inspired by one myron lotz…" ( Letters of Sylvia Plath , 567). The poem has quite an interesting publication history. "Mad Girl's Love Song" was first published in the Smith Review (Spring 1953). It then appeared in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle . Made...

From time to time I have tweeted and/or written about auctions on eBay for Sylvia Plath items. I recently, selfishly found out about an auction for an item that I wanted with without promoting potential competition. This was greedy of me, especially considering the item would be, if I won it, a duplicate. Sylvia Plath published four poems in Chequer 11: "Epitaph for Fire and Flower", "On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad", "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper", and "November Graveyard" (Winter 1956-1957). When I saw that a copy was up for auction I decided not to tweet it out. I guess I am a bit of a hoarder? I have no idea where this copy came from, other than "England" of course. The first copy I got, as a gift, formerly belonged to Christopher Levenson, who himself is well represented in this issue of Chequer as well as Plath. An image of the cover of Levenson's copy is on the Periodicals page of my website for Sylvia Pla...

Emory University recently put a finding aid online for the Sylvia Plath collection, 1952-1989 . A small collection, but one certainly with significant materials for the Plath scholar. The items were purchased in 2014 and include: Folder 1: Compass , Southeastern Massachusetts University, Summer 1987 Folder 2: Mademoiselle , January 1959 Folder 3: The New Yorker , August 3, 1963 [2 copies, one annotated by Aurelia Plath] Folder 4: Smith Review , Fall 1952 Folder 5: Smith Review , Spring 1953 [annotated by Aurelia Plath] Folder 6: Thomas, Trevor, Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters , 1989 [inscribed from the author to Richard Larschan and includes a letter from Thomas to Larschan and several clippings about the work] The material in folder 1, Compass is the the magazine of Southern Massachusetts University (now University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), and features an article by Maeve Hickock titled "Aurelia Plath and Richard Larschan". The article is about the video produ...

Not every one of my archival searches for Sylvia Plath materials in libraries and special collections has been successful. As you will have noticed from some of this series of posts on Sylvia Plath collections, I have gone after journals and periodicals to which Plath submitted her work. Two archives I contacted confirmed that they had no letters or typescripts from Plath. Those are the records of the  Antioch Review (housed at the Lilly Library of Indiana University) and the Partisan Review (housed at Boston University's Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center ). The Partisan does have a carbon of one letter to Plath. Antioch Review published "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" by Plath in their June 1957 issue. The Antioch Review records were sold to the Lilly Library a couple of years ago. ( More on what is in the Antioch Review records here .) Partisan Review published Plath's "I Want, I Want" in their Fall 1959 number and "Metaphors for a Pre...

Just a small post today. Sylvia Plath had two poems published in Texas Quarterly : "Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" and "Witch Burning". Both poems appeared in specially themed issues on Britain and largely featured British writers. Which is bizarre as Plath was American (her way of talk was an "American way of talk"…), both poems were written in Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, as parts of her sequence "Poem for a Birthday" in the Fall of 1959. However, Ted Hughes figures prominently in the issue, so she must have been lumped in with him.   In the " Texas Quarterly records", held at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, there is just one typescript that a kind archivist searched for me (us!) and found: "Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" which appeared in the Winter 1960 issue. Ted Hughes' poem "Lines to a Newborn Baby" and his story "The Caning" also appeared in the Winter 1960 issue. One...

In the blog post from 22 April 2010 , I vastly understated the extent of the holdings at the University of Virginia that regard Sylvia Plath. Initially I thought the collection just contained the eight books formerly belonging to Sylvia Plath, among them her hallowed copy of the Saint Botolph's Review . However, I recently (recently being August 2010! Shameful to have been drafting and revising something for this long...) stumbled upon another title that they hold, the Guinness Poetry Award, 1960-1961: winning poems  - which printed her poem "Insomniac" - and discovered that in all the University of Virginia (UVA) in fact holds several hundred items by or about Sylvia Plath. The Virgo catalog shows more than 260 records. UVA acquired their "Sylvia Plath Collection" in July 1993; and it, along with the Plath collection held at the Wilson Library of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), makes these two mid-Atlantic states real archival powerhouse...

The first post about Sylvia Plath archives in this, American Archives Month, is one that I began writing in March, 2010. Shocking! The archives of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse , from 1912-1961, are held in the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago  and contains documents originated by Sylvia Plath. The collection includes typescripts by Plath, marked up with editorial instructions; correspondence; and proofs, many with autograph annotations by Plath. The poems in typescript and/or proof are: "Wreath for a Bridal", "Dream with Clam-Digger", "Strumpet Song", "Metamorphosis" (later titled "Faun"), "Two Sisters of Persephone", and "Epitaph for Fire and Flower" from Poetry 89 (January 1957: 231-237). "The Snowman on the Moor", "Sow", "Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats", and "On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad" from Poetry 90 (July 1957: 229-236)...

In February 1962, the London Magazine printed Sylvia Plath's poem "In Plaster," which she composed on March 18, 1961 - the same day as "Tulips." In addition to the poem, London Magazine printed twenty-six writers responses to a series of questions under the collective title "Context." We know Plath's response memorably begins, "The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and a documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America-"Juggernaut, The Warfare State," by Fred J. Cook in a recent Nation." But did you ever wonder to what specifically Plath was replying? See below: The twenty-six responses were submitted by (in order of appearance in the issue): Robert Graves, George Seferis, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Philip Larkin, Lawrence Durrell, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, Laurie Lee, Thomas Blackburn, ...

Sylvia Plath wrote "The Bed Book" in the spring of 1959. By June of that year she was actively marketing it; but in her lifetime it never came to be printed. In 1976, both Faber and Harper & Row brought out editions in the UK , illustrated by Quentin Blake and in the US , with illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully. While not included in any bibliography to date, excerpts of "The Bed Book" were printed in two American periodicals in 1976. In October 1976, Woman's Day published it. Though excerpted, there are some textual variations, mostly to do with stanza structure, capitalization, etc. This publications includes beautiful color illustrations by Sal Murdocca. It appears on pages 98-99. In December, Cricket , a magazine for children, printed 'Beds'. Like the above, it is excerpted and there are textual variations. This publication includes black and white illustrations by Emily McCully, on pages 32-38. The illustrations are the same as...

I'd like to call your attention to a new page on A celebration, this is , my website for Sylvia Plath. The new page is a thumbnail gallery of periodical covers which published Plath's poems, stories, etc. As I find new images they will be added. Enjoy! Many people are to be thanked for their contributions to this page. You know who you are: with deep thanks. To introduce this page, I'm publishing here the cover of My Weekly . It was in this issue that Plath's short story "The Perfect Place" appeared on 28 October 1961. Drafted in late 1960 under the title of "The Lucky Stone", this story went unacknowledged for more than 40 years. To read more on its discovery - with the aide of Irralie Doel and Lena Friesen, see my essay in Plath Profiles . See here also the first page of the story.