Sylvia Plath Kept Her Rejection Slips
Quick answer: Sylvia Plath collected rejection slips for years, widely reported at 45 from one magazine alone, before The Colossus. What her submission habits teach poets.
Before Sylvia Plath was a name printed on book spines, she was a teenager in Wellesley, Massachusetts, opening envelopes that said no. She had decided early that she would be a professional writer, and she pursued it with a bookkeeper's discipline: submissions logged, markets researched, postage budgeted from her earnings. Seventeen magazine is widely reported to have rejected her around forty-five times before finally accepting her story 'And Summer Will Not Come Again' in 1950, when she was seventeen years old.
The rejection slips did not go in the bin. She kept them, and her journals treat them with something close to respect, as receipts proving the work was being done and sent. That attitude, rejection as evidence of professional activity rather than a verdict on worth, is the thread running through her whole short career, and it is the part of her story a discouraged poet can actually use.
A teenager running a submissions office
Plath's ambition had infrastructure. Encouraged by her mother Aurelia, whose collection of her daughter's letters documents the era in detail, she studied the magazines she wanted to crack, matched pieces to markets, and turned rejected work around to the next address quickly rather than letting it sulk in a drawer. She sold her first national short story while still in her teens and placed poems and articles through her years at Smith College, funding part of her education with prize money and fees.
The habit scaled with her. In August 1951 she won Mademoiselle's fiction contest, and in 1953 she was selected as one of the magazine's guest editors in New York, the experience that later fed The Bell Jar. None of this made rejection stop. It never stops for anyone; the acceptances simply start arriving in between. What her records show is a writer who understood that early and organised her life around it.
The breakdown, and the honest place it holds
It would falsify the story to paint Plath as an untroubled machine of persistence. In the summer of 1953, after the Mademoiselle stint and a rejection from a Harvard writing course she had badly wanted, she attempted suicide and was hospitalised, events she survived and later transformed into fiction. Her lifelong depression was real, recurrent and ultimately fatal in February 1963. Resilience on the page and suffering in the life coexisted; one did not cancel the other.
That coexistence matters for how a reader takes her example. The submission discipline was not a cure and should not be sold as one. It was, though, the thing that kept her work moving toward print through years when her health did not cooperate, and it is why the poems existed in publishable order at every stage. Craft routines carried what mood could not.
A first book that was rejected under many names
The Colossus, her only poetry collection published in her lifetime, had a long paper trail behind it. Through the late 1950s she assembled, dismantled and re-titled the manuscript repeatedly, submitting it to book prizes including the Yale Series of Younger Poets, where it did not win. The collection that Heinemann finally published in London in October 1960 had been through years of reshuffling, with individual poems earning their places one magazine acceptance at a time in journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Even after The Colossus, the noes kept coming. Her novel The Bell Jar was declined by her American publisher, a rejection that is widely reported and stung accordingly, and it appeared in January 1963 in Britain under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The poems that became Ariel, written in an astonishing rush in late 1962, were sent out to magazines like everything else, and several were turned down by editors who have been quietly apologised for by history. She died within weeks of The Bell Jar's publication, at thirty.
The strange arithmetic of her afterlife
Ariel, published posthumously in 1965 in an order arranged by Ted Hughes, made her one of the most read poets of the century. In 1982 her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, an honour awarded to very few writers after their death. The magazines that had rejected individual Ariel poems now sit in bibliographies as footnotes to their own missed call.
There is no tidy moral in that, and Writory will not pretend otherwise: she deserved the recognition alive. What the arithmetic does prove is narrower and more useful. Editorial rejection measured the fit between one poem and one desk on one morning. It measured nothing about the poems, which were the same words before and after the Pulitzer. Any poet holding a rejection this week is holding the same kind of document Plath filed by the dozen.
What a working poet can take from her desk
First, separate the ledger from the mirror. Plath logged rejections as transactions, not judgements of her soul, at least on her disciplined days, and the logging itself created distance. A spreadsheet of submissions, with dates out and dates back, turns a wound into a workflow. Second, resend fast. Her habit of getting a rejected piece back into the post kept despair from having a fixed object to settle on; the poem was always somewhere, being considered, which changes how a writer waits.
Third, build the book poem by poem. The Colossus was not accepted as a lump; it was dozens of individual acceptances assembled into inevitability, so that by the time Heinemann said yes, most of the manuscript had already been vetted in magazines. A poet can start that flywheel anywhere work is read and answered, and a contest that responds to every single entry with a score, the way Writory's monthly cycle does between the 1st and the 30th, means the flywheel never spins in silence.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a submissions log with dates; the record turns rejection into data you can act on.
- Send a rejected poem to the next market within a week, before doubt renegotiates its worth.
- Study the journals you submit to the way Plath studied Seventeen and Mademoiselle; fit is half the game.
- Enter reputable prizes and contests; her career ran on them from Mademoiselle onward.
- Assemble your first collection from individually published poems rather than waiting to sell it whole.
- Protect your health as deliberately as your writing time; the desk routines only work if you are there to run them.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to a rejection slip, thanking it, with total sincerity or total irony, for exactly one thing it got right and one thing it will never know.
Questions
How many rejections did Sylvia Plath receive?
No complete count exists, but the volume was large and well documented. Seventeen magazine alone is widely reported to have rejected her around forty-five times before her first acceptance in 1950, and rejections continued throughout her career, including her American publisher declining The Bell Jar.
Was Sylvia Plath famous in her lifetime?
Only modestly. She had a solid magazine publication record, one poetry collection, The Colossus (1960), and The Bell Jar published under a pseudonym weeks before her death in 1963. Her major fame came posthumously with Ariel in 1965, and her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
Did Plath really keep her rejection slips?
Yes. Her journals and her mother's edition of her letters document that she saved rejection slips and treated them as part of a professional writer's paperwork. She wrote about them as proof that she was producing and submitting work, which was the standard she held herself to.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.