First American edition. The dedication copy. Inscribed by Hughes beneath the printed dedication 'TO SYLVIA', "because the book belongs to you just as surely as all of my love does, Ted August 26th 1957." Hughes's later ownership signature to the front endpaper. Original black cloth in yellow and grey dustwrapper. A near fine copy in a very good, slightly rubbed and marked dustwrapper.

The dedication copy of Hughes's first book, inscribed to his wife, Sylvia Plath, associating two of the most notable post war poets. Plath had long thought that Hughes's market was in America.
"your news... is just another documentary to my vivid conviction that england is not your place. people have the right of judging your life and work here who are narrow, bigoted, and just plain ignorant; worse there is no higher court of appeal than this monolithic london...
I feel, in taking you to america, I am bringing, as it were, the grail to a place where it will be reverenced properly. time it may take; but in america, your voice will, increasingly, be heard. and loved." - Letter to Hughes (20 October 1956).
Thus encouraged, Hughes agreed to enter a collection of poems in a competition organised by The Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York, the prize for which was immediate publication of the collection by Harper in New York. Plath typed and ordered the manuscript and sent it off in late 1956. There were 287 entries, from which the judges, Stephen Spender, W.H.Auden and Marianne Moore, chose The Hawk in the Rain, commenting, "The talent is unmistakable. The work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate action."
On receiving the news in February 1957, Plath wrote to her mother,
"I am more happy than if it was my book published! I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted's and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all..." (24 February 1957)
On the strength of the competition and impending publication, Plath later arranged for Faber to publish the book in the UK.
Hughes and Plath moved to America in June 1957 for Plath to take up a teaching post at Smith College, where they remained until late 1959. The date of this inscription and a similarly dated copy received by the University of Southern California indicate that copies were in circulation some three weeks before official publication. The American edition would have been published first, but was delayed until just after the Faber edition in order to make the latter eligible for selection by the Poetry Book Society Choice. It was however the Harper edition which Hughes was on hand to promote and likely that the copy of the Faber printing inscribed to Sylvia, which is undated with a shorter inscription was not done until their return some two years later.
750 copies of the first edition were published, which as Plath had anticipated were well received and acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. The edition sold out immediately and was reprinted during the same month.

PROVENANCE: Sylvia Plath (presentation inscription); Ted Hughes (following Plath's suicide in 1963); Frieda Hughes (Hughes and Plath's daughter).

Sagar & Tabor A1b

Stock ID: 37862