A carbon paper hidden in the back of an old notebook owned by Sylvia Plath has revealed two previously unknown poems by The Bell Jar author. The paper, which was discovered by scholars working on a new book, has lain undiscovered for 50 years and offers a tantalising glimpse of how the poet worked with her then husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes.

The academics, Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg, have also found a clutch of poems abandoned by Hughes that reveal the depth of his turmoil over his wife’s death. The poems had been written for his final collection, Birthday Letters, in which he broke his silence about his tumultuous relationship with Plath, which ended after she discovered he was having an affair.

Sylvia Plath, a voice that can’t be silenced | Sarah Churchwell Read more

Written at the start of Plath and Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain, two of her own poems – The Shrike and Natural History – as well as a fifth possible poem by Plath.

As well as unpublished work by Plath, Crowther and Steinberg discovered previously unseen photos of Plath in the archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

All of their discoveries are revealed in These Ghostly Archives, published this week in the UK. Both authors are Plath scholars; Steinberg has worked closely with the poet’s estate on various books and collections, and Crowther is the author of two other books about Plath, who killed herself in 1963.

Steinberg, who discovered the carbon paper while searching the archive, said he felt “a jolt” when he realised what he had discovered amid “a convoluted strangle of typewritten words”. “I thought, ‘I might be the first person in 40 years to work with this document’,” he added.

Using Photoshop, he deciphered the typing on the paper, which is watermarked with an image that might have appeared in a Plath poem – a woman gazing at her own reflection in a pool of water.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of two unseen photos of Plath, here with Ted Hughes at Oscar Williams’s apartment in New York, June 1958. Photograph: Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

First revealed was To a Refractory Santa Claus, a poem about Spain and fairer weather – a subject that Plath returned to later in Fiesta Melons and Alicante Lullaby. Written after Plath and Hughes’s honeymoon in Benidorm, it consists of two 11-line verses and pleads for escape from the cruelties of an English winter to the fresh fruit and sunshine of warmer climes.

Although they said the poem was inferior to Plath’s later work, the academics described the imagery in the poem as “spectacular”, citing in particular a description of the fog of breath as a “white disguise”, likening it to vapour escaping an open-freezer door. English winters were a recurrent theme for Plath, who struggled with the wet and dark climate after moving from the US.

The second poem proved harder to decipher. Titled Megrims, it is a monologue addressed to a doctor by a paranoid speaker about a series of “irregular incidents” that range from the discovery of a spider in a coffee cup to an owl about to strike. The existence of a third unpublished poem is also likely, said Steinberg, who added that he hoped technology would reveal its secrets in the future.

“I think the poems definitely can be classed as early,” he said. “[Because] no other copy appears to exist it might be surmised that they aren’t very good. But in fact, the imagery in To a Refractory Santa Claus is beautiful. And there is a kind of loose, almost slangy-casual language in Megrims that took years for Plath to finesse in her Ariel voice in, for example, her poem The Applicant.”

Crowther added that the poems provide a unique insight into the early development of the writer who would go on to write the novel The Bell Jar and the posthumously published collection, Ariel. “They show her grappling with personal issues and attempting to turn them into poetic pieces, but at that stage she had not quite found her Ariel voice,” she said. “They also reveal that, even at the start of her relationship with Hughes, there was a shared focus on poetry.”

Crowther’s further discovery of an abandoned poem by Hughes in the British Library added poignancy to the previously undiscovered works by his first wife. Described by Crowther as “vividly resurrecting” Plath, the untitled poem deals with her final hours on 10 February 1963, and begins: “I know you walked in the snow alone.” Over the following two stanzas, the poem reveals Hughes tormenting himself about her isolation and inability to contact him on her final night. As such, the poem can be seen as a companion piece to Hughes’s Last Letter, a poem about the death of Plath that was published after his death.

Details in Hughes’s abandoned, untitled poem offer the possibility that Plath may have left the poet a final letter detailing her final hours. In it, he describes his wife walking repeatedly to a nearby phone box to call him, dressed in a long, black coat, her hair coiled at the back of her neck.

Interest in Plath and Hughes remains strong. Earlier this year, it emerged that a trove of previously unknown letters written by Plath to her former psychiatrist Dr Ruth Barnhouse contained allegations that Hughes beat her two days before she miscarried their second child. Carol Hughes, the poet’s widow, called the claims “as absurd as they are shocking to anyone who knew Ted well.”

The first volumes of Plath’s collected letters are also due to be published later in 2017 by Faber. A film adaptation of The Bell Jar, Plath’s only novel, starring Dakota Fanning and directed by actor Kirsten Dunst, is set for release in 2018.

Commenting on these latest finds, Steinberg said his gut feeling was that there was much more material yet to be found about the two poets – including Plath’s final journals, which were supposedly destroyed by Hughes when she died. However, Steinberg admitted: “This requires hope and faith, possibly delusion. But I do feel there are caches of papers still to find the light of day.”