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 "G...

Sylvia Plath's "A Winter's Tale" (the poem) was a New Yorker poem, appearing in their 12 December 1959 issue. While she marketed it to the magazine in mid-1959, Plath was encouraged by Howard Moss to resubmit it later in the year after revising a line. "A Winter's Tale" is a poem of place, and that place is Boston, Massachusetts. Plath and Ted Hughes had been living in Beacon Hill at 9 Willow Street since September 1958, so she got to experience the Christmas season in the city in 1958 like never before. Plath worked briefly that autumn in the psychiatric ward at the Massachusetts General Hospital, likely in the same building and ward where she was a patient five years earlier in the late summer of 1953. She and Hughes familiarized themselves with their city by foot, often going on long walks along the wharves and through Scollay Square. They also took in museums and galleries and frequented the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. The compos...

The essay on Sylvia Plath by Linda Freedman that appears in Fiona Green’s edited collection Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is entitled: "Sylvia Plath and 'The Blessed Glossy New Yorker '". On the surface, this is a brilliant title for an essay that considers a subject that should prove fascinating. Plath coveted just about everything about The New Yorker : the typeface, the cartoons, the quality of the writers it published,the content; even the sheen of the paper. However, Freedman's treatment of Plath and The New Yorker is wanting; the essay suffers from distinctive gaps and oversights which suggest a lack of familiarity with the subject. The initial disillusionment comes in Freedman’s second paragraph when she states: "even though her [Plath's] work appears more frequently in other periodicals such as the Ladies' Home Journal , Mademoiselle , and Seventeen " (118)....

The New York Public Library has a couple divisions that hold Sylvia Plath manuscripts and related materials. In the Manuscripts and Archives division is The New Yorker records, which holds correspondence to, from, and about Plath. The Berg Collection holds a varied assortment of Plath materials, from juvenilia to late works. This post will merely summarize the holdings, and but to learn more, either visit the library yourself (recommended) or please see " These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England " by Gail Crowther and myself, published in Plath Profiles 5 (Summer 2012) (also recommended). New Yorker Records The bulk of material on Plath is in Series III, Editorial Correspondence, subseries 3.3 Fiction Correspondence, 1952-1980, for the following years; 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1977. In the scope and content note, it explains that poetry correspondence is included in the fiction correspondence file. There are also some Plath related ...

Sylvia Plath's story "The Shadow," written in 1959, recounts Sadie Shafer's leg biting incident from "the winter the war began" ( Johnny Panic , Harper & Row, 1979: 143). Plath's Unabridged Journals record that on 7 January 1959 she was "finished, almost" with the story (457). On 31 May she considered it - of the six most recent stories she had written - one of the top three (486). However, by 15 June 1959, Plath thought that "The Shadow" "reads might thin, mighty pale" (496). She failed to publish the story, sending it in on 1 September 1959, along with "The Wishing Box" and "The Daughters of Blossom Street" to London Magazine (which accepted only "The Daughters of Blossom Street" on 13 November 1959 and printed it in their May 1960 issue). There is little chance London Magazine was the only periodical to which Plath submitted this story. The Submissions List Plath maintained is now he...

What are we supposed to believe? We rely on technology: some more than others. We use it for its convenience and generally for its swiftness. No longer does one really have to remember on their own where we read something because we can keyword search, highlight, makes notes, and bookmark passages that we read. Saturday night, while working on one of my papers for the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, I tweeted that Sylvia Plath mentioned The New Yorker 58 times in her journals. I got this number by searching my Kindle for PC app on my computer. There were 61 results, but three of them were in the front matter (list of illustrations), notes, and the actual caption for the illustration. (Maybe I should add that I searched for the term in quotation marks; repeating the search just now without quotation marks I got 62.) To my consternation, I woke up this morning to see that someone else found 63 results. Of course we all want to be right! I thought: How could this be? So, I searche...

As Hurricane Irene aims for Massachusetts and much of the east coast of the US, the New Yorker's Book Bench posted some good hurricane reads , including as you might hope, Sylvia Plath's "Ocean 1212-W." Unfortunately for the blogger, Macy Halford, she seems to have relied on the dating of "Ocean 1212-W" to what is printed in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams ...she should have read through some of the articles I co-wrote with Gail Crowther (in particular, "These Ghostly Archives" | These Ghostly Archives, Redux" ) to get it correct that the prose piece was not written until late January 1963 (sent to the BBC on 28 January 1963). I wish she would have mentioned "The Disquieting Muses," too... "In the hurricane, when father's twelve Study windows bellied in Like bubbles about to break, you fed My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine And helped the two of us to choir: "Thor is angry: boom boom boom! Thor is an...

Since October is, for us, unequivocally associated with Sylvia Plath, I thought I'd offer a special double did you know. I spoil you, I know. In 1994-1995, Tim Kendall founded the magazine Thumbscrew . His hope was that it would be an "antidote to a London poetry scene which appeared to outsiders as cosy, self-savouring, mediocre." Did you know that Thumbscrew 9, Winter 1997-1998, was a special issue on Sylvia Plath? The following is a list of citations for those articles which appeared in issue 9: Adcock, Fleur. "Why Plath is (Not) Very Important to Me." Thumbscrew 9. Winter 1997-1998: 2-3. Korelitz, Jean Hanff. "An Inexcusable Thing." Thumbscrew 9. Winter 1997-1998: 5-9. Quinn, Justin. "Plath as Exemplar." Thumbscrew 9. Winter 1997-1998: 11-12. Tyrrell, Patricia. "The Semtex Poet." Thumbscrew 9. Winter 1997-1998: 27-29. Kinsella, John and Tracy Ryan. "'Farther Off Than Australia': Some Australian Receptions o...

Sylvia Plath long sought to publish poetry and short stories in The New Yorker , one of the most esteemed periodicals of all time.    Plath received a first reading contract from The New Yorker on 28 February 1961, while she was recovering in hospital from having her appendix removed. The contract came with a check for $100, and meant that Plath would send all her new poetry to them first.  To that point, Plath had placed six poems with The New Yorker . Beginning with her first publication of "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" in the 9 August 1958 issue (pictured above), she published also:  "Night Walk" (later "Hardcastle Crags") on 11 October 1958;  "A Winter's Tale" on 12 December 1959;  "Man in Black" on 9 April 1960;  "Water Color of Grantchester Meadows (Cambridge, England)" on 28 May 1960; and "The Net Menders" on 20 August 1960.  Did you know that in Plath's lifetime, after she signed this contract, The ...