On 22 February 1959, Sylvia Plath read seventeen of her poems which Stephen Fassett recorded for Harvard University. The original reel-to-reel tapes are held by the Houghton Library and were digitized back in the early 2000s. When I worked for the Woodberry Poetry Room I would relish any opportunity I had to go and see the tapes, still in their original boxes. Plath wrote the names of the poems she read on the back of the box. Beneath the last poem, "Point Shirley" she added a little flourish. And dividing the columns, she drew a little face. Fassett (presumably) even wrote along the side of the box "(Titles listed by Sylvia Plath)." The Fassett recording studio was located at 24 Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill, just around the corner from Plath's apartment at 9 Willow Street.   If you are interested in Plath's poetry recordings , please consider heading over to A celebration, this is to read more. All links accessed 12 February 1963.

The Houghton Library at Harvard University recently received and processed the Stephen B. Fassett correspondence . Fassett lived at 24 Chestnut Street, Boston , just around the corner from Plath and Hughes. He was an audio engineer who recorded many of poets during the era. I worked the the papers in this collection on 29 August 2017. There is a letter from Ted Hughes and a Christmas card signed by Sylvia Plath as well as letters from Dido Merwin, W. S. Merwin, John Lincoln ('Jack') Sweeney, and with the Estate of Isak Dinesen. All text below from the "Scope and Contents" from the finding aid to the collection. Ted Hughes correspondence Item 1. Letter to Stephen and Agatha Fassett (from 3 Chalcot Square, London, England) Date: 1960 May 14 Scope and Contents: Hughes provides an in-depth description of his and Sylvia Plath's return to England: "the perfect superhuman jungle, through which we have come" and the "two week ordeal of searching ...

This post looks at the Education of Sylvia Plath for the spring semester, 1954, and at the courses she took at Harvard Summer School, 1954. Sylvia Plath returned to Smith College for the second semester of the 1953-1954 academic year. She resumed living in Lawrence House and during the spring had her own room (it was the same room she lived in the previous year, 1952-1953, but she had no roommate). It is unknown what courses Plath had signed up to take when decisions were made in the spring of 1953. It might be that the courses she took in the Spring of 1954 were among them; but it might also be that she was experimental. Plath officially took three courses: English 321b, American Fiction 1830-1900 : Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and James. M T W 9. Newton Arvin. Russian 35b,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky : M T W 12. George Gibian. History 38b, Intellectual History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century : Main trends of thought in their relation to the political, social, and economic backg...

[ This post has been modified due to unreasonable pressure from certain parties. The point of the original post was to vilify Jeffrey Meyers'  baseless claims and  correct his horrendous research. If you are interested in reading the original post, please email me. Contact information available via the " About Sylvia Plath Info Blog & Contact Info " tab. --pks ] 60 years ago today, on 27 July 1954, Sylvia Plath was featured in a photograph in the Boston Globe pointing at … wait for it … a globe! In the brief article "More Girls Than Ever at Harvard Summer School", Plath was photographed in the Widener Library with Everetta Rutherford of Columbia, South Carolina. It is difficult to determine at which country or continent Plath is pointing, but it might be India? That is neither here nor there... Also neither here nor there, it was just 11 months after the news broke that she had been found hiding in her family's basement in Boston and other U.S. newsp...

Fifty years ago today, on August 22, 1961, Sylvia Plath sent her friend Jack Sweeney, then curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, a letter and enclosed the worksheets/drafts of her poem "Tulips." Did you know that shortly thereafter - about two months - Sweeney put the poem on display at the Woodberry Poetry Room? The first notice of the exhibit appears in the "Metropolitan Boston Calendar: A Guide to This Week's Events" in the Boston Globe on October 29, 1961, on page 74. The notice reads, "A manuscript poem ("Tulips") on display at Lamont Library." Additional notices about the exhibit ran on November 5 (page 67); November 12 (page 65); and December 10 (page 83), of the editions I browsed via microfilm at the Boston Public Library. The worksheets and letter are now held by the Houghton Library (which oversees the Woodberry Poetry Room) and can be requested for research. It is one of only a few of the Ariel poems not held by Smith C...

Among other wonders, the Schlesinger Library holds the Papers of Mary Ellen S. Capek, 1963-1972 (call number: Schlesinger A/C2379; T-356). The collection consists of one folder and contains Capek's correspondence with Ted Hughes, James Merrill and others about her research on Plath. Also included is an audiotape of an interview with Plath and her reading of a selection of her poems, mostly from Ariel , probably recorded on October 30, 1962; the original is held by the British Council. The letters date from 1968, when Capek (then Mary Ellen Stagg) was working on her thesis. Most of the correspondence surrounds her attempts to find out if there were access to unpublished poems and manuscripts. With the release in 1971 of The Bell Jar , Crossing the Water and Winter Trees (in 1972), the correspondence increased as Capek (as Capek) attempted to find out how the 1965/1966 Ariel differed from Plath's original intentions (based on Hughes' "Note" in Winter Trees...

The following was my introduction to yesterday's Sylvia Plath listening hour at the Woodberry Poetry Room. We had a nice group of people, as well as some lovely Plath archival materials which, I think, enhanced the event. The “voice” of the poet has a double-meaning. On the one hand it is speaker of the poem – the poems’ persona – which knows no boundaries: it can be a woman, a man, a shirt, a stone, a tree branch: anything. The other meaning is of course more literal: the spoken voice of the poet. And we are fortunate enough to work in or work with an archive of recorded poetry: the poet’s voice captured, here at the Woodberry Poetry Room. We are gathered here today to hear Sylvia Plath. Born and raised just miles from here, Plath’s first published poem appeared in the Boston Herald when she was 8. She lived in Jamaica Plain, Winthrop , and Wellesley before attending Smith College and University of Cambridge , in England . It was at this other Cambridge where, in 1956, she m...

Woodberry Poetry Room This is a reminder that Friday, 17 April, 2009, there will be an poetry listening event at the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library, Room 330, at Harvard. If you're in the area, come on by for a 3 PM start. I'll be introducing this week's Reel Time on Sylvia Plath, as well as playing a selection of Plath's poetry recorded for the Woodberry Poetry Room. On hand, also, will be some archival holdings that can only be seen in the Poetry Room!

Sylvia Plath collections: Woodberry Poetry Room Sylvia Plath gave two readings for the Woodberry Poetry Room ('WPR', or 'Poetry Room') in 1958 and 1959. The Poetry Room has one of the largest collections of recorded poetry in the world. As I work there, I am assisting in a project to digitize the recordings to make them available either to the Harvard community, or the whole world wide web. In a routine visit to the stacks to select reel-to-reel tapes to digitize, I found the original cardboard box containers for the Plath recordings. Most of the containers feature minimal information, likely in either a curator's hand or the audio technician. However, when I pulled the Plath boxes off the shelf, I was amazed to see that she herself had written the track listings on the back. The recording for Friday June 13, 1958 is written in a pink ink. It may have been red, but the color appears pink to me. There are two poems per available line. The recording for her Febr...

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 the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, there is a small collection of materials related to Sylvia Plath by the poet Jean Valentine. The finding aid is online here . The following description is from a subseries of prose materials: 6.8-6.9. Plath, Sylvia, 1995-1998, n.d.: letter to the editor of The New Yorker, an unpublished piece titled "Notes on Sylvia Plath", and clippings about Plath. If anyone out there has seen this material, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll try to get access to it one day.

The Houghton Library at Harvard University has a small Sylvia Plath collection. The finding aid for the collection is online here . I work at the Houghton Library and will try to see the collection sometime soon. The collection consists of two drafts of a poem entitled "Sickroom Tulips" ("Tulips"?) and a letter to John L. "Jack" Sweeney, a Harvard professor and friend of both Plath and Hughes. Click here for a good biographical history of the Sweeney's. The contents of the collection, as described in the finding aid, are: (1) Plath, Sylvia, 1932-1963. Sickroom tulips. A.MS.s.; [n.p., 1961]. 3s.(3p.) env. (2) Plath, Sylvia, 1932-1963. [Sickroom tulips] TS.s. with A.MS. revisions; [n.p.] 18 Mar 1961. 2s.(2p.) (3) Plath, Sylvia, 1932-1963. A.L.s. to John Lincoln Sweeney; London, 22 Aug 1961. 1s.(2p.) With A.MS. poem by Ted Hughes "You roam with my every move" on the reverse side.