Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath: Copycat

Recently I had cause to revisit Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (2007, OUP, sadly out of print). It is absolutely an essential book for Plath's readers. The illustrations alone are worth it to own.

In Kathleen's wonderful book-length essay "Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath" there is a reference to a book, An Ear for Uncle Emil by E. R. Gaggin, Plath read that wasn't - but now is - listed in her library on LibraryThing. Plath presumably read this book circa 1944 and was inspired to copy one of the many illustrations drawn by Kate Seredy in the book, which was first published in 1939.

Plath of course learned some of her drawing skills by copying, and it is analogous to suggest she learned to write poetry in the same way: by copying. Of course there were innate skills that she brought to each art form: I'm not suggesting otherwise.

In considering the drawing reproduced in Eye Rhymes, on page 12, I thought: would it not be interesting to see what the original looked like? Fortunately a local college library holds the book so I went over there yesterday to find the source. Below is the original, and beneath, courtesy of Google Books, Plath's drawing.





Update: 17 November 2015:
Today, reading Plath's diary, I learned that this drawing was completed on Wednesday, 19 July 1944.

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last