jonkers rare books
thing in the english language is eligible) and is due by november 30. it must be double spaced and about 60 pages. now, I ran right home and counted, estimating your poems double-spaced. 55 pages. almost exact. let me do this typing (it will give me the excuse of having a carbon of all your stuff to keep eternally, which I wanted anyhow). I’m sure you’ll win this; I feel very queer about it.” Plath’s prescient confidence in Ted’s ability to win the prize is also reflected in her as - sessment of the judging panel of Auden, Spender, and Marianne Moore, “I trust miss moore’s exactness & love of form; and you certainly have enough wit to win auden and social war consciousness to please spender.” Plath tells Ted to bring his MS to London on his next visit so they can finalise his entry, and thanks him for his last letter, “your voice is like the spirit of god on the waters. I really move in it and with it. I love you to tell me things about reading.” She closes the letter with a ten line autograph postscript, “I love you and perish to be with you and lying in bed with you and kissing you all over and go just wild with thinking + wishing + remembering your dear lovely mouth + incredibly lovely made flesh and oh how warm you are. I love you teddy teddy teddy and how I wish I could be with you, living with you, and writing in granchester or something. All my love ever / Your own love wife / sylvia” Sylvia Plath discovers the poetry competition that would make Ted Hughes’s name. Press was an important figure in postwar British literary circles, and his mentioning of the poetry contest was to make an indelible mark on Plath’s and Hughes’s careers. The contest was open to any poet who had not yet published a book, with the prize being publication by Harper’s. Plath immediately thought Hughes should enter. She had already written with some prescience that America would be where Hughes would make his mark, when she remarked in a letter to Peter Davison that “London and England are too small for him”. Plath typed up Hughes’s manuscript and submitted it to the competition the following month. The judges were W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender, all of which Plath had met, and she thought each would have their reasons for liking Ted’s work. She reported her con - fidence in his genius and inevitable victory in a letter to her mother that month, “I don’t see how they can help but accept this it’s the most rich, power work since Yeats and Dylan Thomas.” Hughes’s victory and subsequent publication of The Hawk In The Rain was announced the following February. It received high acclaim from every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir, and quickly sold out. PROVENANCE: Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998); Frieda Hughes (1960-). Price: £60,000
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