London: Heinemann (1960). First edition of Plath's first regularly published book. Presentation copy, inscribed by Plath to the poet Theodore Roethke on the front free endpaper: "For Theodore Roethke with much love and immense admiration, Sylvia Plath, April 13, 1961". Theodore Roethke was the most important of Plath's literary influences, the mentor through whose example she found her own true voice. "Plath had begun reading the poetry of Theodore Roethke, whose poetry collection Words for the Wind contained a sequence of experimental poems in which he attempted to reproduce the imagery of mental breakdown. Roethke's poetry excited Plath to attempt a similar sequence of 'mad' poems. 'I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me,' she mused in her journal. Roethke's example would show her how to use these experiences in her art, and 'be true to my own weirdness.' The result was 'Poem for a Birthday', which Ted Hughes admired very much and regarded as Plath's breakthrough into the subject of her mature style ... it was Roethke's artistic originality that stirred her to emulation. Roethke's poems contained no explanations; they presented an eddying flow of associations from which a reader could fetch themes but no reasons. Adopting Roethke's techniques, at Yaddo Plath experimented for the first time with finding subjective images for the experience of shock therapy.... Words poured from her during those six weeks: a third of the poems that made it into her first published book, The Colossus and Other Poems, were written at Yaddo." [Diane Middleton, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage, (N. Y.: Viking, 2003), pp. 109-110.] So influential was Roethke's poetry on Plath's mature poetry that when she submitted "Poem for a Birthday" to Poetry magazine, it was turned down because it displayed "too imposing a debt to Roethke." And when the manuscript for The Colossus was submitted to Alfred Knopf, its editor Jennifer Jones expressed reservations about "her imitativeness ... most pronounced in a long poem that seems to be so deliberately stolen from Roethke's 'The Lost Son' that I would almost fear the charge of plagiarism." Knopf would eventually publish The Colossus in America, but only after confronting the issue of Roethke's influence. As Jones explained her "anxiety of influence" to Plath: "One reason ... that we have brooded so long over our decision is my uncertainty about one particular poem which seems frankly too derivative to me not to invite a good deal of criticism.... 'Poem for a Birthday' (is) in terms of imagery and rhythmic structure ... so close to Theodore Roethke's 'Lost Son' that people would be likely to pounce on you." If Plath would cut "Poem for a Birthday", Knopf would publish the book. Plath agreed conditionally, cutting five sections from the long poem, but asking that two sections be published as individual poems: "Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" and "The Stones", the poem which Plath asked to be placed last in the book. The importance of Plath's "Roethke-influenced" long meditative poem in her development as a poet cannot be overestimated. Ted Hughes would come to regard "The Stones" as "the most significant poem Plath had written", a turning point in her canon. Calling it "unlike anything that had gone before in her work", Hughes would write in an essay years later: "In its double focus, 'The Stones', is both a 'birth' and a 'rebirth'. It is the birth of her real poetic voice, but it is the rebirth of herself. That poem encapsulates, with literal details, her 'death', her treatment, and her slow, buried recovery. And this is where we can see the pecularity of her imagination at work, where we can see how the substance of her poetry and the very substance of her survival are the same." In an essay in the New York Times Book Review in 1963, M. L. Rosenthal could point to the influence of Roethke on Plath's poetry, but go on to say: "In the absolute authority of their statement they went beyond Roethke into something like the pure realization of the latter day Emily Dickinson." [Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (N. Y.: Da Capo, 1999), pp. 244, 254; 259; 339.] Plath met Roethke while the latter was in England during the winter of 1960-61, and her inscription in this copy of The Colossus (which she must have sent him after he returned to America in March 1961) testifies to the profound bond she felt she shared with him. Plath died at the age of 31 in February 1963; Roethke died the following August at the age of 55. One of the finest association copies imaginable of the only book of Plath's poetry published during her lifetime. 8vo, original green cloth, dust jacket. A fine copy in dust jacket, preserved in a half-morocco slipcase.