A landmark publication collecting all of Sylvia Plath's poems together for the first time has been released, revealing that some of her greatest works were written on stolen pink paper from the college where she taught.
The Pink Paper Fetish
On a Monday evening in March 1958, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote herself a note: "Must be up early, to laundry & steal more pink pads of paper tomorrow." At the time, she was working as a first-year English teacher at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she herself had studied, and where these "pink pads" were used for internal memos. She had been surreptitiously stockpiling them all month. "Have already robbed enough notebooks from the supply closet for one & ½ drafts of a 350 page novel," she had written a week earlier, about the "pink, stiff, lovely-textured" pads that made the task of writing seem "finite, special, rose-cast". In 1962, living in England and running low on her talismanic paper, Plath wrote to an old Smith colleague, clamouring for more. "I have a fetish for them," she said in her letter. "Do you think I could send a check to someone & buy a dozen of those pink pads??? My Muse is mad for them!"
She was yet to write the electrifying Ariel poems that would be published posthumously in 1965 and make her name as one of the greatest poets in modern literature after her suicide at the age of 30 in 1963. But the illicit "pink pads" would play their role in that work's conception. After writing the first draft of The Bell Jar on them, her autobiographical coming-of-age novel about a young woman unravelling one summer in New York, she turned the pages over and wrote some of her most famous poems on the other side. It was on this paper she drafted unforgettable works from the majestically furious "Daddy" to her tender ode to her sleeping baby son, "Nick and the Candlestick".
The Landmark Publication
Those poems have now been printed countless times in countless editions, and this month they appear again in the very first edition of Plath's complete poetic works, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Edited by scholars Amanda Golden and Karen V Kukil, it is a landmark publication that doubles the amount of material in the Collected Poems edited in 1981 by her husband Ted Hughes, which saw her posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Coming in at a hefty 944 pages, the volume is divided into two halves, beginning with the decade of poetry for which she became best known, finishing with the writing she did as a child and adolescent. The first is from 1937, when the famously precocious writer was just five; she'd publish her first poem at eight. It's possible to map some of Plath's literary fascinations from these early works; her interest in nature and the supernatural is already there in poems about fairies, trees and camping, written in 1943, aged 11. The innocence of poems like 1942's "My Teaparty" ("I had a little teaparty/ Three friends were invited;/ We had some milk, we had some cake/ And we were excited") belie Plath's writerly discipline and ear for rhythm and language.
Copious Notes and Insights
Copious notes accompany the poems - and in the book's introduction, its editors fondly note Plath's affection for pink paper. "She always wanted to write a novel, but she was struggling and she was exhausted, so she started taking this pink paper and thought it would inspire her," explains Golden on why those "pink pads" seemed to hold so much power for the writer. "I think that it was also partly that it was official from her school, that it signified in some ways her success, that she was invited back there. So much of her class identity I think was bound up in being a good student. Even though she frees herself from that a bit, I think she took a lot of pride in being that student, and I think it shaped very much her attention to detail and her thoroughness in her work."
Plath excelled as a student at Smith, a prestigious women's arts college, which she joined in 1951. But the events of one difficult summer, which saw her win a coveted internship at Mademoiselle magazine alongside several other women before experiencing a nervous breakdown and attempting suicide (and which Plath would write about in The Bell Jar), forced her to temporarily pause her studies to undergo psychiatric treatment. Today the college is home to Plath's main archive – including those many sheafs of pink paper.
Controversies and New Discoveries
Previous editions of Plath's work have not been without controversy, largely due to Hughes' role, alongside his sister Olwyn, as her literary executor. Some of Hughes's editorial choices have become notorious, from his reordering of her Ariel poems from the original arrangement Plath left behind after her death, to the fact that he chose to only include work in the Collected Poems from 1956 onwards – the year that she had met him. In the latest edition, the first half of the book begins in 1953, when Plath was still at Smith, a time when Golden and Kukil say she was having work accepted in "publications with a larger audience and more prestige in America". Hughes died from cancer in 1998 at the age of 68, just months after publishing his final collection Birthday Letters, a series of poems about his life with Plath and the impact of her death.
"We set it back a little bit further, but I think the impulse is somewhat similar," says Golden. "It's trying to start it at a date when she had reached a certain point as a poet, where the work was progressing, and you could make some distinction between what came before and that point. We didn't want to present all the poems as of the same quality. We wanted to show an evolution." The main distinction between this publication and Hughes's earlier version, says Golden, is that she and Kukil were able to work with "a lot more information" than Ted and Olwyn. "There's a lot more that's come to light in the past 40 years. Archives have been established, books and collections have been published, and in the course of editing those collections, a lot of poems surfaced that were in archives, that [Ted and Olwyn Hughes] didn't have."
The Creative Process
Readers of The Poems of Sylvia Plath will be able to see how Plath painstakingly typed out lists of the work she had submitted to magazines and poetry journals – also on her beloved pink paper. On these fastidious records, she would keep track of acceptances and rejections, just as she did for Hughes and his poetry. The new collection also includes lists of subjects written out by Ted Hughes, that she would annotate with poems she had composed in response. "It was part of their creative synergy – he came up with ideas," says Golden. "I think he was brainstorming with and for her."
It was in 1958 that Plath had her first poems accepted in The New Yorker after years of snubs. She would go on to be published in The Atlantic, The New Statesman and The Observer and to read her poems on the BBC, publishing her debut collection The Colossus in 1960. Publication was important to Plath, not just because towards the end of her life she was a single mother who needed to make money from her writing, but in terms of "developing a professional identity", says Golden. "The idea that she is part of something larger I think is important," she adds. "That her work was accepted and acknowledged as being of a certain quality. And a chance to keep going, too – to develop this voice and this profession."
Future Discoveries
For Plath watchers, though, there can hardly be a more enticing idea than the prospect of the recovery of lost works. As the new edition attests, she wrote prolifically, even given her short life. She wrote two further novels, one of which she destroyed, another of which has gone missing – not to mention her final journal, which Hughes admitted to destroying, to no small amount of opprobrium. In terms of Plath's poetry at least, Golden believes there could still be more work out there to be found. "There's always materials that were sent out for publication and not returned, and they often surface in publishers' archives," she says. "So I think things will continue to surface."
'The Poems of Sylvia Plath' is published by Faber.
