FT267


Mention Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the average poetry fan, and the first thing that comes to mind (other than the poetry, of course) is likely to be images of doomed romance, suicide, or love gone sour. Less well known are the pair’s experiments with the Ouija board. According to Hughes, in a note to his wife’s poem, Ouija, Plath “occasionally amused herself, with one or two others, by holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits’.” [1]

These communications were frequent enough for Plath to pen an unpublished verse dialogue, sometime in 1957 or 1958, entitled Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, and featuring, appropriately enough, a character named ‘Sibyl’.