PLATH, Sylia (1932–1963)

Typescript poem ‘Humoresque’

Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1949

Single sheet; 277 x 216mm

‘Never let them say of me / that I was not all happy once’

One of Plath’s finest early poems, composed by her at age 16 and typed by her in 1949, while still a pupil at Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School).

Around April 1947 Plath started to write a new kind of poetry – ‘a very new, modern style’, as she wrote in her diary – in which formal rhyme schemes and regular stanzas were replaced by a looser patterning of internal and half-rhyme, varied line length, and the use of an apparently autobiographical ‘I’. This, for Plath’s biographer Heather Clark, was ‘an artistic turning point’ – the first glimpse of the towering poetic persona of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’. Over the next two or three years Plath would hone this voice – though most of these early experiments were excluded from the Ted Hughes-edited Collected, and most remain unpublished.

Here, perhaps taking a title from the 1946 Jean Negulesco movie (or from the pairing ‘Grotesque/humorous’ in the poem itself), Plath begins with the startling phrase quoted above, undoing the sentiment with a careful juxtaposition of ‘the voices downstairs / Discussing the latest bargains at Filene’s’ with ‘The sudden hissing of wind / Like a jet of steam in the treetops’. (For the significance of the store Filene’s, especially in relation to Plath’s mother Aurelia, see Clark, Red Comet, Ch. 4.)

Like her first ‘confessional’ poem, ‘I thought that I could not be hurt...’, ‘Humoresque’ ends with a bracketed section that comments on what has gone before: ‘(Yet all the while, / Amid the shrieking fury, / The voices downstairs / Squeaked and jabbered senselessly: / Grotesque and humorous / As hollow reeds / Piping shrill in the / Teeth of a / Cyclone.)’

Plath’s seriousness and sense of self is evident in the presentation of the poem: Plath scholar Karen Kukil believes this set of typed poems were prepared in 1949, clearly representing a ‘selected poems’ to that date.

Near fine condition: 5mm closed tear to the top edge.

Provenance: Sotheby’s, New York, 6 April 1982; Bonham’s, London, 16 March 2006.

References: Steinberg, ‘Numbering Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, No. 108; Plath, Collected Poems, p. 340 (citation only); Edward Butscher Collection of papers on Sylvia Plath, Smith College (photocopy only); Plath MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana (two typescript copies).