On 18 September I posted about Sylvia Plath broadsides. I referred to a broadside of a poem entitled "Pigeon Post". On a recent visit to Smith College , I found this poem in the working papers for Plath's Collected Poems . These working papers contain all known versions of Plath's poetry, either in typescript or printed version. It's a very remarkable part of the collection that I didn't know existed. The typescript indicates this to be a poem belonging to the 'Cambridge Manuscript', poems Plath submitted as part of her final examinations as a student at Newnham College, Cambridge University. This dates the poem between 1955 and 1957; but as it was not included in The Collected Poems , it can be presumed to be from 1955. Only three libraries list themselves as owning this broadside, the University of Chicago, Princeton, and Cambridge University. I obtained a high quality digital scan of the broaside in the mail the other day. It's the poem, c...

Did you know that as Sylvia Plath prepared to graduate from Newnham College at Cambridge University in 1957, after two years of studying and writing, she submitted to the English faculty a manuscript of poems entitled "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea"? This has come to be known as "The Cambridge Manuscript". She formed this poetry collection over the course of her Fulbright years, and sent various versions out to publishers in the US, in particular, to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which she failed to win year after year. The manuscript was lost for about a decade, but it was found around 1967/8. In their 7 February 1969 issue, The Cambridge Review ran a number of essays on Plath. A. Alvarez submitted a short essay entitled "Sylvia Plath: The Cambridge Collection" on the poems, and printed along side the essay in this issue were the following poems, "Street song," "Natural history," "Resolve," and "Aeria...