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



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