SAINT BOTOLPH'S REVIEW

Sole edition. 8vo. Original red paper wrappers in the white printed dustwrapper. A fine copy in a fine dustwrapper with the slightest wear to foot of spine. A fine copy of the poetry magazine that introduced Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes. Saint Botolph's Review was a Cambridge poetry journal, edited by David Ross and co-founded with Hughes, who was also a principal contributor. The journal was a flop and was discontinued after one issue, but it has an indelible place in the history of modern poetry, by dint of its lively launch party on 25th February 1956, at which Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath first met. Plath had purchased a copy of the journal on the corner of King's Parade and Silver Street earlier that day. Having been struck by Hughes's poems, she dashed back to the student from whom she purchased a copy, asked where she might meet the contributors, and so received an invitation to the magazine's launch party. Plath recalls their meeting in her journal, "Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room. it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling about his poems.". The attraction was instant and mutual and what followed - a whirlwind romance, marriage, honeymoon in Spain, return to England shortly to be followed by America - made for an emotional and creative maelstrom that was to launch the careers of both Hughes and Plath, who would, for a brief period, shine so brightly as the golden couple of modern poetry. Sagar & Tabor C8.…