Sylvia Plath - Part IV

In a New Yorker from December of 2006, Tad Friend wrote of his interestingly eccentric mother: "As a sophomore at Smith, she came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden. 'Just as well I didn't win,' she'd say, 'Head in the oven, and so forth.'"

(This claim may have been an exaggeration on her part ... I've never read of any contest Auden judged at Smith -- he did, a few years after Plath left Smith, judge at least one of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets contests which Plath entered and in which she was a finalist ... but even if exaggerated, Tad Friend's mother's witticism is priceless.)