Here’s a fun fact that will make you feel like a slacker: Sylvia Plath’s first known poem was published when she was only eight (and a half) years old. Eight-year-old Plath submitted her work to the Boston Herald with a letter that read “Dear Editor: I have written a short poem about what I see and hear on hot summer nights,” and it ran in the Sunday paper on August 10th, 1941. Here is the brief and charming poem, titled, simply, “Poem”: Hear the crickets chirping In the dewy grass. Bright little fireflies Twinkle as they pass. Plath’s letter ended: “Thank you for my Good Sport pin,” as she was a member of the Herald’s Good Sport Club for Children. The editing impulse was present in Plath’s life even then: those four lines appeared in a longer unpublished poem she wrote that same year, titled “My House.” In that poem, the first two lines read, “At night I hear the crickets chirp / in green and dewy grass.” If you’re interested in more juvenile writings from Plath, this video from Gothamist takes a tour through her childhood manuscripts at the New York Public Library. The materials include comics she drew for her brother, and the caption under a drawing of herself is particularly bittersweet: “This is Sylvia. She smiles and is polite.” |
