Skip to main content

This auction has ended. View lot details

You may also be interested in

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

Lot 121*

PLATH (SYLVIA)
Annotated typescripts of five poems written when at Smith College, Smith College, 1948-1950 where dated

11 November 2015, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £13,750 inc. premium

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

How to sell

Looking for a similar item?

Our Books & Manuscripts specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.

Find your local specialist

Ask about this lot

PLATH (SYLVIA)

Annotated typescripts of five poems written when at Smith College, comprising 'Aquatic Nocturne', opening: "down where sound/ comes blunt and wan/ like the bronze tone/ of a sunken gong/ or the garbled jargon/ of a drowning man...", two lines revised in ink with an alternative opening indicated in pencil, also marked up by her teacher ("This experiment is a most successful one/ I don't quite get these lines"), typed initials at head, marked in pencil "85"; 'Terminal', opening: "Bolting home from credulous blue domes...", one line revised in ink, typed name and Smith College address at head, marked in pencil "16/2"; 'Van Winkle's Village', opening: "Today, although the slanting light reminds...", first four lines reworked in ink and marked "Rewritten", typed name and Smith College address at head, marked in pencil "80/2"; 'The Dark River (P. N.)', opening: "You are near and unattainable...", dated in ink "1948", marked in pencil "67a"; 'The Invalid', opening: "Half-past four on an April morning...", carbon undercopy, title in ink and dated "1950", marked in pencil "52b", 5 pages, in folders marked with sequence numbers, 4to, Smith College, 1948-1950 where dated

Footnotes

'THIS EXPERIMENT IS A MOST SUCCESSFUL ONE' – early poems by Sylvia Plath. Later variants of two of these poems, 'Aquatic Nocture' and 'Terminal', were to be included by Ted Hughes in 'A Selection of Fifty Early Poems' in The Collected Poems (1981), as examples of her finest early work. All appear in his check-list of her juvenilia, and are represented by variant manuscripts or typescripts in the Plath Archive at the Lilly Library; the present typescripts deriving from her estate (Sotheby's, New York, 6 April 1982).

Hughes wrote of her early work: 'At their best, they are as distinctive and as finished as anything she wrote later on. They can be intensely artificial, but they are always lit by her unique excitement. And that sense of a deep mathematical inevitability in the sound and texture of her lines was well developed early on. And one can see here, too, how exclusively her writing depended on a supercharged system of inner symbols and images, an enclosed cosmic circus... As poems, they are always inspired high jinks, but frequently quite a bit more. And even at their weakest they help chart the full acceleration towards her final take-off' (p. 16).

Additional information

Bid now on these items

Signed to Spencer Tracy 1952 Hemingway, Ernest. 1899-1961. The Old Man and the Sea, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952.

A Presentation Copy of Kennedy's First Book to Spencer Tracy. Kennedy, John F. 1917-1963. Why England Slept. New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc., 1940.

ADVERTISING POSTERfor 'The Suffragette' newspaper, [c.1913-1914]

ILLUMINATED ADDRESS – CLARA CODD Illuminated printed address signed by Emmeline Pankhurst, [1909]

MUSIC & RECORDINGS – ETHEL SMYTH Collection of printed music, song sheets and records, [c.1911-1912]

SUFFRAGETTE INSIGNIA - SPEAKER Speaker's ribbon for the Great 'Women's Sunday' Demonstration in Hyde Park, 21 June 1908