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Lot 168*

PLATH (SYLVIA)
Typescript draft with autograph revisions of her poem ʻSeek No More the Young', here with the deleted typed title "Latvian Threnody", [March 1949]

15 June 2016, 14:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £937.50 inc. premium

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PLATH (SYLVIA)

Typescript draft with autograph revisions of her poem ʻSeek No More the Young', here with the deleted typed title "Latvian Threnody", comprising fourteen lines, beginning: "Where are they now, the young, the golden-haired..."; with autograph doodles, alternative annotations and drawings in pencil and in blue, green and red crayon; marked in pencil at top right-hand corner "2a", 1 page, on thick paper with rounded corners, 4to, [March 1949]

Footnotes

An attractive early autograph manuscript-cum-typescript. The second, third and ninth lines have been heavily reworked ("childlike" in line two altered to "ardent" then "dawning"; in line three "who at the dawn had shared" altered to "the children who have shared"); while various alternative readings and jottings have been added by her in the lower margin ("...The present is a memory of the past and a preparation for the future, but what is there to remember of the past or to hope for the future if we do not act in the present..."), plus doodles of a female profile and gangling male in swimming shorts. The Lilly Library holds a typescript with autograph revisions and carbon, entitled ʻLatvian Threnody (or) Lament', dated 11 March 1949; a variant title being ʻSeek No More the Young' (Plath MSS. II, Lilly Box 8, folder 3); the present typescripts derive from her mother's estate (Sotheby's, New York, 6 April 1982).

Additional information

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