Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Edith & William Hughes, on their latest publications, 31 March 1959

Sylvia Plath

Typed letter signed, to Edith and William Hughes ("Dear Ted's mother & dad")

looking out the window "into a grey hazy day", explaining that Thom Gunn had been awarded the Somerset Maugham Award because the judges "probably figured Ted had enough", but promising that Hughes's "last five poems are the most colorful and exciting he has done yet", with details of the poems by both writers that will be published in Audience including "a poem I wrote about riding a runaway horse", with news of her brother and her own work for the head of the Sanskrit department at Harvard ("he is a poetic soul at heart & has given me two articles of his on Sanskrit poetry"), 1 page, folio (252 x 203mm), yellow airmail stationery, [9 Willow Street, Boston, MA,] 31 March 1959, light creasing

PLATH REFERENCES A POEM THAT PREFIGURES 'ARIEL'. Her poem 'Whiteness I remember', referenced in this letter, described "my runaway ride in Cambridge on the horse Sam". In late August 1962 she was to begin riding lessons on a plodding and elderly mare called 'Ariel'. Her great poem, 'Ariel', drew both on these lessons and also on her terrifying but exhilarating earlier riding experience. 

LITERATURE

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume Two, pp.307-8