Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas with Dr Amanda Golden & Dr Siân Round

Date/Time
27/06/2026
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Saturday 27 June, 2pm – 3pm

As an undergraduate at Smith College, Sylvia Plath called Dylan Thomas her ‘favorite modern poet’ (Letters v.1, 709). Plath studied Thomas in college, heard him read in 1953, and later taught his poems as a first-year English instructor at Smith in 1958. By examining marginalia in Plath’s personal library and her notes for teaching Thomas’s poetry, this talk will offer new insights into Thomas’s influence on her poetry.

Following Dr Golden’s presentation, she and Dr Siân Round, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, Swansea University, will discuss Plath and Thomas, particularly in light of the publication of The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber, May 2026), co-edited by Golden and Karen V. Kukil. The Poems of Sylvia Plath is the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students, and general readers. Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition. The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life, and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected, and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts, and related archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history.

Dr Amanda Golden is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology. She is the author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (2020), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath  (2022) with Anita Helle and Maeve O’Brien, and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016). She co-edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a new, scholarly, annotated edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, with Karen V. Kukil (Faber and Faber, May 2026).

Tickets:

• £5 full price
• £3.50 concessions

Please book your ticket here: https://www.ticketsource.com/dylanthomas