The Colossus. Poems

PLATH, Sylvia

Published by Heinemann (1960), London, 1960

About this Item

8vo, original green cloth, dust jacket. Signs of use, but a very good copy in worn and soiled dust jacket. Signs of use, but a very good copy in worn and soiled dust jacket First edition of Plath's first regularly published book. Presentation copy, inscribed by Plath on the front free endpaper: "For Luke & Cynthia / with love - / Sylvia / April 13, 1961." A highly important association copy, rich in personal interest and history: E. Lucas (Luke) Myers, an aspiring writer from Tennessee, was intimately connected to Ted Hughes and Plath. Plath met Luke Myers at Cambridge, where she and Myers were studying, and admired his poetry and fiction. In her journal entry for February 25, 1956, she wrote: "I have learned something from E. Lucas Meyers (sic) although he does not know me and will never know I've learned it. His poetry is great, big, moving through technique and discipline to master it and bend it supple to his will. There is a brilliant joy, there, too, almost of an athlete, running, using all the divine flexions of his muscles in the act. Luke writes alone, much. He is serious about it; he does not talk much about it. This is the way." - Sylvia Plath, The Journals (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 207. On March 3, Plath commented on Myers' fiction: "A chapter - story from Luke's novel arrived, badly typed, no margins, scrawled corrections, & badly proofread. But the droll humor, the atmosphere of London & country which seeps indefinably in through the indirect statement: all this is delicate & fine. The incidents & intrigues are something I could never dream up . . . Nothing so dull & obvious & central as love or sex or hate: but deft, oblique. As always, coming unexpectedly upon the good work of a friend or acquaintance, I itch to emulate, to sequester." - Plath, The Journals, p. 344. Luke Myers was a close friend of Ted Hughes, and it was outside the chicken coop behind the rectory of St. Botolph's Church that Myers rented from Mrs. Helen Hitchcock, the widow of a former rector, that Hughes used to pitch his tent on weekend visits to Cambridge University, from which he had graduated a year and a half before. St. Botolph's rectory "was a poets' haven, anarchic and unjudgmental", with Mrs. Hitchcock "turning a blind eye to the capers, bibilous and otherwise, of her undergraduate lodgers, of whom she was very fond." - Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (London: Viking Penguin, 1989), p. 73. In February, 1956, a group of young Cambridge poets including Luke Myers, Ted Hughes, Daniel Huws and David Ross, among others, had just put together a little magazine appropriately named the St. Botolph's Review after Luke Myers' digs where they often gathered, and the launch party for the magazine (of which only one issue was published) was to be the occasion for the first fateful meeting between Plath and Hughes on Saturday, February 25, 1956. Plath, who had read some of the poetry by the St. Botolph's group - and two of whose own poems had been criticized recently by one of them, Daniel Huws, in the student magazine Chequer - purchased a copy of the Review on the morning of the party, and memorized several of Hughes's poems in anticipation of attending the party and meeting him. According to Plath's journal entry, after dancing for a while with a drunken, "satanic" Luke Myers, she ran into Hughes. Amid the crush of the party, "I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: â most dear unscratchable diamond' and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, â You like?' and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room . . . And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never agai. Seller Inventory # 22326

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Colossus. Poems

Publisher: Heinemann (1960), London

Publication Date: 1960

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition