Volume XXI No. 4. First edition. Octavo. Original paper wrappers. A very good copy.
 
The first appearance in print of ten of Sylvia Plath’s most famous poems, including one that Ted Hughes later withheld from publication.
 
"Death & Co.," "Getting There," "Lady Lazarus," "Little Fugue" and "Daddy" were later collected in Ariel (Faber, 1965). "The Swarm," "The Other," "Childless Woman" and "Thalidomide" were later collected in Winter Trees (Faber, 1971). Ted Hughes did not include the tenth poem that appears here, "The Jailor" in Plath’s three posthumous collections.
 
One of the early readers of their publication here in Encounter was Robert Lowell, who wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in October 1963:
"Have you read the posthumous poems by Sylvia Plath? A terrifying and stunning group has come out in the last Encounter. You probably know the story of her suicide. The poems are all about it. They seem as good to me as Emily Dickinson at the moment. Of course they are as extreme as one can bear, rather more so, but whatever wrecked her life somehow gave an edge, freedom and even control, to her poetry. There's a lot of surrealism which relieves the heat of direct memory, touches of me, and I'm pretty sure touches of your quiet and humor. She is far better certainly than Sexton or Seidel, and almost makes one feel at first reading that all other poetry is about nothing. Still, it's searingly extreme, a triumph by a hair, that one almost wishes had never come about."