Sylvia Plath meticulously kept track of her publication endeavors. She made submissions lists from around the time she a junior in High School (1948-1949) to within days of her death in February 1963. She was assuredly the consummate professional. If a work was published she usually kept a copy of its appearance for herself, though there are some instances were poems or works in prose were not retained by her (or her estate)--- see this post on her "Class Poem", for example . However, her poetry was reprinted periodically in publications (newspapers mostly) about which she likely never knew. That is the subject of this blog post. Stephen Tabor's seminal Analytical Bibliography did not have the advantage of so much text-searchable digital content. But even if it had, some of these publications that will be mentioned today may not have appeared in the pages of his cherished book. His book tended not to include second publications of Plath's works. Which is absolutely f...

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.

This is a blog post I started several years ago (in 2013!!!) but never posted for a variety of reasons. Today seems like a good day to publish it… In the morning before a Sylvia Plath archives talk Gail Crowther and I gave at Plymouth University in England---please see the  March 2013 Blog archive  for a bit about that presentation.---Gail and I did a bit of Plathing in the villages of Belstone and Corscombe in Devon. Belstone is were Susan O'Neil-Roe lived at "Pear Trees" cottage. (For more on Belstone and "Pear Trees" please click here .) It took two trips to the village to find the house, but thanks to the marvel that is Google we were able to locate the house . From there, we went onto to nearby Corscombe, where was Plath took horse riding lessons on an older, docile horse called Ariel. Being there, the poems "Ariel" and "Sheep in Fog" take on a whole new meaning, as does her December 1962 introductions that she wrote about the poems....

One of the most remarkable aspects that the British Library Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath CD—published in 2010 and lamentably out of print—captures and presents can be found in tracks 8-16, or, those from "The Living Poet" broadcast on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme. "The Living Poet" aired just about monthly and featured other Americans in 1961: Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Stanley Kunitz. Plath was the first female that year and shared the reading of her work with the American actor Marvin Kane. He read five poems and she read four. The introduction to that broadcast, written and spoken by Plath, is very clearly by the author of the poems of The Colossus . What I mean by this is it is eloquent, yet kind of floral. The poems, as they were recorded, are: "The Disquieting Muses" (read by SP); "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" (read by Kane); "Suicide Off Egg Rock" (read by Kane); "Spinster...

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...

Readers of Sylvia Plath will be given a new way to interact with Plath's poetry in Plath Libs , which was inspired by Mad Libs , created in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. The first book features five of Plath's works: "The Glutton", "Maudlin", "Metaphors", "The Hanging Man", and "Winter Trees". Let's say for example that in "The Glutton" that you did not like Plath's line-ending verb "slake"... Well, now you, the reader, can revise the poem yourself! Yee-haw ! The entire poetic output of Plath is scheduled to be Plath-Libbed in a projected 2,999 more five-poem publications over the next 27 years. The first book is available as a free PDF download for a limited time. Subsequent volumes will be sold exclusively at Wal-Mart for $17.99. The cover was inspired by the unanimous success and support of the Faber edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 . All linked accessed 1 April ...

Well, things have been kind of crazy for the last six weeks or so. With the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956  in the UK and the US, and then participating in one event , following other events, looking for reviews, etc. it is not hard to imagine why! But I wanted to give a general update at this point in time on a few things. First up, those reviews: I have started to list review of the Letters on my website for Sylvia Plath,  A celebration, this is . in the " Reviews of works by Sylvia Plath " page. This will be updated as I learn of reviews. The good people at Faber and HarperCollins have sent several to me which is wonderful. If you know of any not list please do let me know about it. I do not read them all but it will be helpful I think to have them tracked. In August and September I did three posts on "The Education of Sylvia Plath", looking at her courses and writings for each academic year: 1950-1951 , 1951-1952 , and 195...

Well...so while I was away on holiday, news broke by Danuta Kean of the Guardian in her article " Unseen Sylvia Plath Poems Deciphered in Carbon Paper " and the report seems to have swept through social media. The story discusses something Gail and I wrote about in our recently published book These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath . While we discuss the finding of two lost Sylvia Plath poems ("Megrims" and "To A Refractory Santa Claus") in the book, some of the "information" in the articles that followed Danuta's was so misleading that it warrants some comment here. First of all: the book, on Sylvia Plath and not just The Bell Jar , is already out and can be purchased through Amazon.co.uk and Book Depository (free international shipping). It will officially be published in the United States in October but do not let this deter you from buying it now. Second of all: the poems are not published in the book, though they ...

One of the most fascinating aspects of studying Sylvia Plath's poems, particularly the late poems, is considering them through the lens of their creation date. That is one way to read them, and in doing so you can sometimes see her using words and images in a consistent fashion, but also seeing how she progresses through her subjects. For example, if you read the October 1962 poems in chronological order you can see Plath reshaping her self, if you will, in her "Bee" poems written from 3 to 9 October. After reestablishing that self (a poetic selfie?), she turns to shed external, familial subjects (burdens) like her father and mother "Daddy" and "Medusa" respectively, written back-to-back as it were on 12 and 16 October. (Plath had spent the weekend after writing "Daddy" out of town in Cornwall.) But yet the poems read quite differently when done so in the published book format. Though written second, "Medusa" appears first in Ariel:...

At the time of Sylvia Plath's death on 11 February 1963, a vast amount of her papers --the majority perhaps-- were in her mother's house at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley. These papers now form Plath mss II at the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington . Aurelia Plath would later gave nearly 250 items to Smith College in December 1983. Have you ever worked with Plath's early poems at the Lilly Library (or at Smith or Emory, where there can be found also some copies)? The poems are in Box 7 (poems A-M) and Box 8 (poems N-Z). Additionally, many of Plath's early poems have recently appeared at auction and if you have taken the time to view the images online, you may have noticed small penciled-in numbers in the top right corner. Here are two examples from recent auctions: From Sotheby's December 2014 auction: Numbered 3b From Bonhams' March 2016 auction: Numbered 21/2 Tucked away in the back of Plath mss II, Box 15, Publications Scrapbook, are ...

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...

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes traveled to the end of Spain for their honeymoon in the summer of 1956. After getting married, they went from London to Cambridge to London to Paris to Madrid, where they rested before moving on to Alicante and, ultimately, Benidorm. They left Spain via Barcelona on 22 August 1956, stayed in Paris for about a week, and returned to England on 29 August 1956. In all she had been one the continent for more than two months. This post is about Plath's time in Benidorm and was inspired by Gail Crowther's finding and sending me the following two videos in April: Benidorm in Color, 1950s and Antique photographs of Benidorm . These, in congruence with a long paper on Plath's time Benidorm "De quan Sylvia Plath va vindre a Benidorm" by Pasqual Almiñana Orozco , were positively revelatory in my understanding more clearly than ever Plath's time there. Of course, one cannot consider Plath's time in Benidorm, also, without use of the ri...