Last April, some of Sylvia Plath’s letters were discovered and the world went bonkers as we read up the scarring events of her past. Seems like she has not yet done with her poems and her legacy is still popping from unexpected sources. This time, two poems written by Plath herself have been discovered on a sheet of carbon paper found lying inside an old notebook.
The Guardian reported, Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg, who are scholars working on a new book about Plath, discovered these two new poems along with others that written by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes after her suicide, and subsequently abandoned.
Steinberg, while discovering the carbon paper, said he felt “a jolt” as he realized what he had found amid “a convoluted strangle of typewritten words”. “I thought, ‘I might be the first person in 40 years to work with this document’,” he told
The Guardian.
All of the material belongs to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, but Crowther and Steinberg used Photoshop to decipher the writing on the mouldy paper. They have since traced Plath’s poems to 1956, the year that she and Hughes had met. The academics are also wondering if they have come across a third unpublished poem. The possibility of more work being discovered “requires hope and faith, possibly delusion,” told Steinberg to
The Guardian. “But I do feel there are caches of papers still to find the light of day.”
The poems vary greatly in theme. “To a Refractory Santa Claus”, the first one, is written from the perspective of someone longing to leave the murky weather of England, whereas the second one, titled “Megrims”, has a paranoid speaker addressing their doctor about peculiar things like owl attacks and spiders in coffee cups.
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