PLATH, Sylvia.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Colossus. Scarce proof copy of the author's first book, the only collection of poems she published in her lifetime. Proofs were circulated in small numbers, possibly as few as 20 or 25 were printed.Plath wrote most of the poems during a creative breakthrough in September 1959, while staying with Hughes at Yaddo, an artists' colony in upstate New York. Three months pregnant with her daughter Frieda, Plath began writing confessionally with an ironic edge, a decisive shift from the poems she composed at Smith and Cambridge. From Yaddo, Ted wrote to his sister Olwyn that "Sylvia has begun to write in a completely new style - obviously her own at last", and Plath herself wrote in her journal that she had been "true to my own weirdnesses". The manuscript was turned down by Henry Holt and by New Directions founder James Laughlin before it was accepted at Heinemann in February 1960.An institutional search reveals nine copies in libraries worldwide, seven in the US and two in the UK.

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