Britain's literary world was stunned last night after the discovery of three forgotten Sylvia Plath poems revealed a searing sexual disgust and technical immaturity, casting new light on her reputation as one of the century's greatest poets.
The untitled works were so bad they should never have seen the light of day, despite their potential insights into her troubled marriage to the late poet laureate Ted Hughes, said friends.
Handwritten on school exercise paper in pen and pencil, they are thought to have been composed in the late 1940s, when Plath was a teenager in Massachusetts.
Mr Rick Gekoski, a London-based book dealer, found them on a shelf in a New York bookshop last month. The six-page pamphlet, including the manuscript of the second of the three poems, was one of a batch of 100 published in Paris in 1975. Trois Poemes Inedits, published by J.J. Dufour, sank without trace.
Poet Al Alvarez said after reading the poems: "I can see why she would never have dreamed of publishing it. It's just adolescent poetry and nothing like as good as other poets' examples of juvenilia."
Mr Gekoski, who owns RA Gekoski Rare Books and Manuscripts in Bloomsbury, London, has sold the pamphlet for £5,750 to a private buyer.