A landmark edition of Sylvia Plath's complete poetry, published this month, reveals her enduring attachment to the pink paper she used for drafting many of her most famous works. The 944-page volume, 'The Poetry of Sylvia Plath', edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V Kukil, doubles the material in the 1981 Collected Poems edited by her husband Ted Hughes.
Plath's obsession with the pink memo pads began in 1958 while teaching at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she surreptitiously stockpiled them from the supply closet. She described them as 'pink, stiff, lovely-textured' and wrote that they made the task of writing seem 'finite, special, rose-cast'. In 1962, living in England, she wrote to a former colleague begging for more, saying 'My Muse is mad for them!'.
After writing the first draft of 'The Bell Jar' on the pads, she turned the pages over and drafted poems including 'Daddy' and 'Nick and the Candlestick'. The new edition includes poems from 1937, when Plath was five, through to her later work. Early poems show her interest in nature and the supernatural, with pieces about fairies and trees written aged 11.
Editor Golden explains the pink paper's significance: '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.' The paper also represented Plath's pride in her academic success at Smith, where she studied before a breakdown led to psychiatric treatment. The college now houses her main archive, including the pink paper sheaths.
