The Robert W. Woodruff Library, Special Collections and Archives Division at Emory University has letters from Ted Hughes to Peter Redgrove. Redgrove is a well known British poet, who died recently in 2003. Letters to Peter Redgrove, [ca. 1966-1984] The collection consists of letters from Ted Hughes to Peter Redgrove from 1966-1984. Hughes discusses his personal and family life and his recent poems and possible projects. The collection also includes twelve typescript poems that Hughes sent to Redgrove and nine clippings by or about Hughes. The letters are in 1 box. Plath is a named person in these letters. The full finding aid to this collection is online here . The home page for the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Library is online here .

This is a follow-up to my 12 July posting on the revivial of Edge , a play written and directed by Paul Alexander about Sylvia Plath. Stars Angelica Torn only. Previews begin Sept. 4. Opens Sept. 9 at: ArcLight 152 W. 71st St New York, New York Phone: 212-352-3101

Update: At the time I wrote the post below in 2007, the information presented was the best that I had. Since that point, I have done extensive research into the subject of Sylvia Plath's disappearance and first suicide attempt in August 1953. The result of this research was published in a paper called "'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath" which appearaed in Plath Profiles 3, published in Summer 2010. 54 years ago, Plath disappeared. The local Boston, Wellesley and Massachusetts newpapers ran a number of articles on her disappearance. The articles ran in various editions of the Boston Globe , the Boston Herald , the Daily Hampshire Gazette , and the Townsman , of Wellesley. The suicide attempt occured for a number of reasons. Plath retold the events in The Bell Jar . The lines from her poem "Lady Lazarus" chill its readers, "The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell...

Yesterday I added a new list to the side bar. The list is called Plath Audio & Video. It lists audio and video recordings by Sylvia Plath or about her. I am not sure that it is a complete list, so if you know of something not listed, please send me an email. Some are for sale commercially through Amazon.com, ABEbooks.com; and some are available through Inter-Library Loan.

The Woodberry Poetry Room in Harvard's Lamont Library, houses an vast collection of audio recordings. Plath and Hughes both read during their time in Massachusetts from 1957-1959. Plath read at the Woodberry on 22 February 1959. Below is information about the recorded archives of the Woodberry Poetry Room. They have a website, which is here . Woodberry Poetry Room recorded archives, 1930-1986 Archival Material ca. 1200 audio tapes and phonograph records. Consists of recordings of readings chiefly by American and English poets given at Harvard University. As of 1986 there were approximately 1200 readings in the Woodberry recorded archives, and about 40 new readings are added every year. Beginning in 1985 video tapes of readings were added to the collection. The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard was established in honor of Professor George Edward Woodberry. It was opened in 1931 in Widener Library and was moved in 1949 to Lamont Library. From the beginning, poetry readings, funded by ...

In November 2006, news broke that a graduate student from Virginia Commonwealth University, Anna Journey, found an unpublished sonnet written by Sylvia Plath in the collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. Plath wrote the sonnet, entitled 'Ennui', in 1955 while still an undergraduate student at Smith College. The news received a huge amount of international press and the web-based literary journal Blackbird published the poem on 1 November, 2006 (Fall 2006, Vol. 5 No. 2). The Guardian ran an article, found online here . At the time, Journey was a contributing editor of Blackbird . I admit to being excited when the news broke, but I was quickly disappointed. The poem 'Ennui' is listed in the Juvenilia section of Plath's Collected Poems , hardly qualifying it as a found poem. Whoever sold this story to the press is something of a genius. This was in no way news, and it was in no way a discovered poem. Many of Plath's pre-1956 poems remain un...

The Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books library at Emory also hold letters from Ted Hughes to E. Lucas Myers, his Cambridge friend. Myers is the author of Crow Steered Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath , 2001. When Plath read the Saint Botolph's Review in February 1956, she found Myers' poems equally as forceful and impressive as Hughes'. But, we know who won that race. Letters to Lucas Myers, 1955-1988 The collection consists primarily of correspondence from Ted Hughes to Lucas Myers from 1955-1988. Hughes letters begin the year after he came down from Cambridge and entreats Myers to help him arrange a meeting with Sylvia Plath. Through the years the letters reflect Hughes' life, career, and development as a writer shared with someone whose opinion he sought and whose writing he respected. Hughes discusses his marriage to Sylvia Plath, their homes, the birth and progress of their children, his views on fatherhood, comments on Plath's work and...