A carbon paper hidden in the back of an old notebook owned by Sylvia Plath has revealed two previously unknown poems by The Bell Jar author. The paper, which was discovered by scholars working on a new book, has lain undiscovered for 50 years and offers a tantalising glimpse of how the poet worked with her then husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes.
The academics, Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg, have also found a clutch of poems abandoned by Hughes that reveal the depth of his turmoil over his wife’s death. The poems had been written for his final collection, Birthday Letters, in which he broke his silence about his tumultuous relationship with Plath, which ended after she discovered he was having an affair.
Written at the start of Plath and Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain, two of her own poems – The Shrike and Natural History – as well as a fifth possible poem by Plath.
As well as unpublished work by Plath, Crowther and Steinberg discovered previously unseen photos of Plath in the archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/24/unseen-sylvia-plath-poems-deciphered-in-carbon-paper
The academics, Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg, have also found a clutch of poems abandoned by Hughes that reveal the depth of his turmoil over his wife’s death. The poems had been written for his final collection, Birthday Letters, in which he broke his silence about his tumultuous relationship with Plath, which ended after she discovered he was having an affair.
Written at the start of Plath and Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain, two of her own poems – The Shrike and Natural History – as well as a fifth possible poem by Plath.
As well as unpublished work by Plath, Crowther and Steinberg discovered previously unseen photos of Plath in the archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/24/unseen-sylvia-plath-poems-deciphered-in-carbon-paper
