Perhaps the most anticipated collection of the year by an American poet isn’t yet available to Americans. The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber, 944pp, £40 hardcover), edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, was published in the UK in May, and the critical and public acclaim is starting to roll in. It’s a major scholarly and editorial accomplishment, but it should also satisfy the passion so many readers have for Plath’s thorny and self-determined verse that helped establish the “confessional” school of American poetry.
Golden and Kukil’s collection definitively supplants the only anthology of Plath’s poetry previously available, The Collected Poems, now 45 years old. Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband and a prominent poet in his own right, edited The Collected Poems, which was published eighteen years after her death by suicide, and there has always been a taint of ick to his selection. Was he trying to whitewash his appalling treatment of her? Was he subtly trying to tank her reputational stock in relation to his? Was it inappropriate that a toxic male would control and frame the work of a poet so cherished by feminists?
Those questions are now moot. Hughes died in 1998 and their daughter Frieda, who was only three years old at the time of her mother’s death, now controls the estate. She and Faber & Faber, the eminent London literary publisher that has the rights to her published work, decided that it was time for a new, fuller edition of her work, and looked to the Smith College curator and teacher Karen V. Kukil, who had previously edited both Plath’s diaries and her letters for publication. Kukil then teamed up with Amanda Golden, an expert on Plath, Anne Sexton, and postwar American poetry who works at New York Institute of Technology, and the two of them spent almost fifteen years putting together what is truly a masterful volume, an enormous service to both readers and scholars.
I spoke to them this summer in—of course—Northampton, Massachusetts, where Plath attended college and where one of her major archives is located.
How did this project get started?
KK: One day out of the blue, [Plath’s daughter] Frieda Hughes called me from London. I had just been teaching a class on Plath and using a recording of her, and I could have sworn that the voice on my phone was Sylvia Plath! She asked me to edit her mother’s unabridged journals.
AG: After I read the Journals, I wrote Karen and came to Smith. My dissertation– which became my monograph, Annotating Modernism – grew out of years I spent visiting Smith and working with Plath’s archive. About fifteen years ago Karen asked if I’d edit a volume with her: either the letters or the poems. So I chose the poems! From that point on we were collecting information, drafting proposals. Years would go by; we’d hear back and revise the proposal and so forth. About five years ago we became research affiliates at Smith and began working intensively on the project, figuring out its scope and how we were going to do it.
Why do we need a new edition of Plath’s poems right now, when we’ve had one since 1981?
KK: For the Collected, Ted Hughes selected about 274 poems, and we have almost double that number in our volume. He avoided some of her really early poems, but our book gives the complete arc of Sylvia Plath’s creativity as a poet. Because I edited the journals and the letters, we are actually able to represent Plath’s voice in this book. Sometimes in her journals or letters, she says why she is writing a poem, or gives background information, so we are just honoring her and her take on her ability and progress as a poet.
AG: Also, there is just a lot more information that we didn’t have when Hughes was editing the Collected Poems, because of the publication of the letters and journals, and all of the archives and collections that have emerged in the meantime. So much has come to light in the last forty years.
Are you just including the earlier poems that he chose not to include? Or are there later poems as well that he didn’t include that you have? And why?
KK: Our goal was to edit all of her poems from the very first one she wrote at the age of five to the last one at the age of 30—all of them. Our book is 944 pages, and a lot of that is extensive notes on each poem. These notes give general readers and scholars a blueprint to where the drafts are of these poems, and we give as many variants as we can. With the Ariel poems, for example, most of the drafts are at Smith, and there are as many as ten variants of each poem, so people can email Smith and get copies of some of the variants that we couldn’t include.
In general, we are just trying to show how she revised. We also have images of her submission lists, and from a very early age she is sending her poems out to as many magazines as possible. She is so ambitious, so organized, and she’s basically trying to earn money and recognition for herself. She was 8½ when she sent out the first poem that was published, in the Boston Herald. Right after her father died, she sends out a poem!
They are very simple poems, even happy poems in general. That’s what’s so different about having all of her poems. Most people think about Plath in a very negative, suicidal way, whereas we are showing that she started out very happy in her life.
One doesn’t often associate her with happy poems!
KK: Yes, it’s fun to see not only her happiness, but all of her interests. She was a good artist, she was interested in music.
AG: But there is a seriousness in her early poems too, a gravity and intention that will shape her later work. That sort of intellectual side is there, especially in her attention to detail surrounding her that is later often inflected with darker subjects—is there in her seriousness too, even at a younger age, as a focused high schooler.
In a letter she sends to her mother when she was a sophomore at Smith, she includes a poem she just calls “Sonnet”, which I thought was a remarkable poem.
AG: She was incredibly focused and confident with her talents. She knew that she could achieve great things and wanted to work on her craft.
KK: She was incredibly well read, and there’s just a lot of knowledge behind every poem she wrote. I was just reading her copy of Nietzsche, and it’s filled with annotations!
How did her annotations in her personal books influence your editorial choices or interpretation of the poems?
KK: There are about 150 of her books at Smith, and if she annotated one and it was relevant to the version of the poem we have in the collection, we would include her underlining or marginalia in response to relevant passages. The notes are at the end of our comments on each poem. Those comments will lead you to the various books, and you’ll see how they are interacting with the poem.
AG: I had written a book about marginalia, and it was anchored in her reading practices, so that prepared me well to think about her education. I remark in the notes that she had a habit of including her own poem titles in the marginalia of the books in unexpected places. There was one in Shakespeare, and there were two in her copy of Milton, so she would flag things that not just reminded her of her life or intersected with her, but also with her own body of writing. When you look at her note, it would seem that Henry James’ The Ambassadors is alluding to her poem and not just that she was resonating with it!
Unlike some other archives, it seems that the Plath archive is spread across a number of libraries—Smith, Indiana, a few others. Can you talk a bit about where her papers are that you used, and whether you ran into complications or difficulties from the fact that they are dispersed?
KK: Plath herself sold some of her poems, while she was alive, to a rare-books dealer who placed those drafts at the Lilly Library at Indiana University; then, when Plath died, her mother ended up selling what she had to the Lilly. So the teenage poems tend to be there, and later ones at Smith. But the very earliest poem, the one we start the book with, is at the Morgan Library in New York.
So she was selling her manuscripts while she was alive?
KK: Yes, she realized they were valuable, and at that point she started keeping more of her drafts. The British Library has a number of manuscripts. Harvard has drafts of “Tulips,” along with recordings and typescripts. Aurelia Plath’s granddaughter just sold the Plath family papers to the Beinecke Library at Yale, so many of the family papers are there. All of these places were really generous about helping—giving us access and sending us scans.
AG: Edinburgh has photocopies of typescripts from a writing group that Hughes was in, but Plath wasn’t. She had submitted these poems for consideration to be included in the group. They didn’t let her in—the poet in charge of the group, Philip Hobsbaum, later said he regretted that! The library isn’t allowed to make copies of them, but people are so generous that people would hold them up to me on Zoom meetings and I took screenshots! We were trying, of course, to include every possible version, and those were items Plath prepared.
In the collection, you pay close attention to the literal material of Plath’s writing: her typewriters, the actual paper she used, ink. How did that attention to the real material facts of Plath’s writing shape this collection?
AG: We didn’t know at first we were going to be dating each individual item. We knew that we needed to determine which was the final version, but we didn’t know we would be dating each extant version. So the paper really helped because, for instance, she had purchased certain paper in England, so we were able to distinguish that iteration of the poem as being typed after she first arrived there. These kinds of details were helpful with fine distinctions and were grounded in the time period. Some of the paper was actually made near Northampton, in the Berkshires and Holyoke, so I became really interested in the whole industry of paper mills because they don’t start new ones anymore!
Plath’s mother Aurelia also taught secretarial skills, so she had a special connection to the materiality it involved. And she also was avoiding it: in The Bell Jar there’s a part about Esther Greenwood (the Plath character) resisting learning things like shorthand, but Aurelia taught her to type earlier than other girls would have learned and so she was typing and creating books of her poems. Those kinds of things changed her relationship to writing.
One day, when I was staring at all the versions to find the differences, I noticed the ‘e’ was different on one of her typewriters. It’s one that we don’t have anymore, but the information allowed us to bracket certain items as being from late 1953 to 1956 when she sold the typewriter. These little things, “tells,” you might call them, like in poker, those distinguishing elements, helped us solve problems and answer questions.
KK: In my classes at Smith, I let students type on Sylvia Plath’s own typewriter. They love encountering that materiality.
AG: Students today don’t know about carbon copies or erasable paper, but they were part of Plath’s writing process and her process of keeping records, keeping copies, and sending out copies. She famously sent the poet Marianne Moore carbons of her poems instead of originals, and Moore got mad! She said they weren’t polished enough: “can’t you even type these for me?” I guess Moore wasn’t in the same kind of thrifty mindset that Plath was.
What you showed me yesterday—the first draft of “Lady Lazarus,” written on the back of a typescript page of The Bell Jar, all on Smith College stationery—is an amazing encapsulation of her career, or at least the three things people most know about her besides her suicide.
KK: There are also Hughes’s poems on the back of Plath’s poems sometimes. It’s just a wonderful juxtaposition.
Heather Clark published an outstanding recent biography of Plath, and I know you are both well acquainted with her. How did her book and her research influence your editorial process or this book as a whole?
KK: Heather’s biography is really focused on Plath’s writing. Others focus on [Plath’s] life, but hers is a really rich examination of the writing as well. Heather used to teach at Marlboro College in Vermont [which closed in 2020-ed], so she used to bring her students down to Smith to look at the original manuscripts.
AG: She also received permission to quote and wrote about more of the early poems than any biographer had. Even the one biography that had permission from the Plath Estate, Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, didn’t have access to all the materials Heather consulted, including all the letters and early poems. So her book provided us with an introduction to how all these items fit together.
How does the Plath that you present in this edition as a whole change our understanding of Plath’s poetic accomplishment—or should it?
KK: When we first submitted our manuscript to Faber, this was really my doing—the way that we put together the book was from the first poem, in 1937, to February 11, 1963, the date of her death. Each poem was there, with notes following. And I knew that scholars would love that.
But Frieda Hughes and our editors at Faber really wanted us to start with Plath’s adult poems. They wanted those “adult poems”—whatever we decided those were—clean on the page, so that new readers coming in to Plath would be able to interact with the poem and not be overwhelmed by notes. If they were interested, they could look at the bottom of the page where we’d give the page reference to the relevant notes. Frieda also wanted us to end our book with Plath’s early poems, with notes following each poem.
So our task was to figure out what were her “adult poems”? I started looking at February 1953, when she mastered the villanelle form, and wrote three villanelles. Two of these were accepted by Harper’s, which was the first adult acceptance of her poems. She even uses the word “adult” when she writes back to the editor: “I feel like I’ve entered the Elysian Fields of adult writing.” I remember thinking, “she’s telling us [what her] adult poetry [is]!” So that’s why we start there.
AG: I like that as a starting point; it lets us distinguish that not all of her work is the same quality, but we wanted to make it all accessible. At a certain point, even if it wasn’t exactly then, she does change as a writer, and we wanted to emphasize her college years, when she’s trying more difficult forms. Her early poems are significant in their own right, but we didn’t want people to think that we thought they were equivalent to the later poems.
The book is published by Faber, the British publisher. What are the prospects for an American edition?
AG: Faber has the rights, so the only way to publish the book is through Faber. Faber works with Frieda Hughes. We don’t know about an American edition as we aren’t involved in those negotiations. When I was recently in England, it was in all the bookstores. Can you imagine what it will be like when there is an American edition? It will be very exciting.
My final question is inspired by where we are, where you both live. I’ve been to Northampton a few times, and it always makes me think about women’s colleges, women’s roles in the US, and so forth. What do you think Plath has to say today, in this age of aggressively resurgent misogyny?
KK: She would have been fighting it, my god—she was fearless. Gloria Steinem was one year behind Plath at Smith, so that was percolating through the times.
I was looking at Plath’s copy of The Lonely Crowd, the influential work of 1950s sociology, and the chapter she annotated the most was the one on family life and gender roles. And as we are in an era when more and more powerful voices are saying we should return to Cold War era gender roles, this seems important.
AG: I don’t know when she acquired the book, but there’s a passage in the journals, from when she was living in Boston in 1959), where she describes reading The Lonely Crowd as “an antidote” to Virginia Woolf’s The Years. Years earlier, she said in a letter that she and Ted were both “inner-directed.” But this was part of the circle she was in; these were buzzwords of her crowd at the time. I think that kind of book was really interesting to Plath. The other one she started reading after Virginia Woolf was Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus!
She was also becoming a different kind of writer in Boston than when she read Woolf as a student, when she was admiring all that Woolf had done for the novel. Now she’s becoming more of a prose writer. She had a real interest in journalistic writing, as she practiced it. She also worked as a student stringer for the press board and got published in the local paper.
KK: There’s also a really interesting quote in her April 9, 1957 letter to her former college roommate Marcia B. Stern: “I know now that if I want to keep on being a triple-threat woman: writer, wife and teacher (to be swapped later for motherhood). I can’t be a drudge.” So she wanted to be married, and she wanted to teach, and she wanted to have children after that. So she wanted everything, and you weren’t allowed to want everything at that time, but she did.
Is there any last thing you want our readers to know?
AG: You can order The Poems of Sylvia Plath from Blackwell’s without international shipping costs!
KK: I’m really pleased with the reviews and the enthusiasm. People are writing [to] me from all over the world and are just ecstatic about this book. It gives them a road map to all sorts of new projects, new information. I’m really looking forward to the scholarship that’s coming down the road.
