THE first standalone publication of Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been acquired by the National Library of Scotland.
The addition of the poem A Winter Ship brings the library closer to achieving a complete set of publications by Edinburgh-based Tragara Press. From 1954 to 2012, its founder and sole operator, Alan Anderson, printed 140 works – many of them literature and articles by authors from the 1890s, as well as contemporary 20th-century poets.
“Among book collectors, Anderson was renowned for the quality of his printing, his impeccable taste and his scholarship,” said Rare Books curator Graham Hogg. “His printing was elegant and understated – for him, the text itself was what was most important, and the high quality of the printing was merely an aid to appreciating it.
“It was a labour of love – Anderson wasn’t in it for the money. And he was clearly astute enough to know back in 1960 that Ted Hughes and his hitherto unknown wife would be influential figures in the world of English-language poetry for decades to come.”
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The library bought A Winter Ship from a London-based bookseller last month which was added to the Tragara Press Collection.
No more than 60 copies of the poem were made by Anderson, who came across the poem through correspondence with Plath’s husband Ted Hughes.
“Anderson was impressed with a short story by Hughes and asked if he had anything else that he could print,” said Hogg. “It was then that Hughes suggested a poem by his wife, Sylvia Plath.
“Like the rest of the public, Anderson had never heard of her before. He printed off two proof copies of the poem and Plath chose the one she liked best and sent it back to him with some corrections and kept the other for herself.
“In a letter to her mother in December of that year she mentioned that she had been writing lots of Christmas cards and in many of them she enclosed copies of the leaflet poem. Now we have one of them in our collections.”
Plath was one of the most admired poets of the 20th century. By the time she took her life at the age of 30, she already had a following in the literary community.
Author Joyce Carol Oates has described her as “one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English”.
Her poems explore her own mental anguish, her marriage to Hughes and her unresolved conflicts with her parents.
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