Crockett’s literary approach dovetailed with the New Criticism then sweeping across high school and college English departments. New Criticism focused on a work’s symbols, patterns, and metaphors rather than the life and times of its author. In Crockett’s class, there were no lectures about authors’ lives, a work’s cultural context, or anything resembling literary history. Yet he held an abiding belief that literature could teach compassion and morality, and he encouraged his students to consider the relationship between literature and politics. Harold Kolb, who went on to become an English professor at the University of Virginia, remembered discussions about “the Korean war, the United Nations, the use of the atomic bomb, civil rights, post–World War II refugees, the Cold War, communism, the establishment of Israel, world religions, and world peace.”44 At one point Crockett even asked his students to send $1 a month to CARE. For him, morality was nearly as important as aesthetics; he was no Dadaist. Perry Norton remembered the day Crockett dismissed modern art as “a bunch of garbage.” Several students, including Sylvia, “brought in a canvas and some paints and challenged him to create something modernistic.” Crockett, to everyone’s amusement, “failed miserably.”45 For someone as passionate about social justice as Crockett, splashes on a canvas were the epitome of amoral art.
Crockett was a Democrat, and his liberal sympathies made him a target in conservative, Republican Wellesley. “He believed,” recalled Kolb, “that American society, in its tail-finned post-war boom of success, was in danger of getting it all wrong. His strictures—on materialism, television, spectator sports, celebrities, conspicuous consumption, Miss America contests, fraternities and sororities, political platitudes, journalistic distortion, and deceptive advertising—were brought home intact by youngsters eager to twit to their parents and caused many an uproar around Wellesley dinner tables.”46 Crockett’s attitude toward America’s hollow pleasures was closer to that of the Beat poets than to that of his students’ parents. “Wellesley was highly Republican,” Louise said. “He would talk about moral issues or ethical issues, consumption, and it was probably the only place we were getting it.” He thought, she said, that they “were much too preoccupied with things.”47 Crockett made them see, Pat recalled, “that nobody in this town had been really and truly shaken and that we were to come forth and we were to shake!”48 During the McCarthy era, rumors swirled that he was a communist, and in 1952 he was asked to go before the Wellesley town board to discuss his political beliefs. Crockett stated that he was not a communist but a pacifist, which evidently satisfied the board. Phil McCurdy thought the investigation “ridiculous.”49
When he was later asked about his years teaching Plath, Crockett refused to fan the flames of melodrama. “I’ve received letters from all over the world,” he said in 1981, “asking if I saw any instability in her; did anything about her suggest tragedy? I did not see any of this at all, no indication whatsoever. She was a happy, brilliant girl.”50 He was “astounded” by her gifts, her “almost frightening” talent, her “mercurial brilliance,” and her “fine shining wit.”51 Indeed, Crockett’s intimate, demanding seminar suited Plath’s intellectual and creative needs perfectly. “She had a feeling of vocation,” he said. “She would never be swayed from it.”52 Plath called him “an extraordinary man. I like him so—he does not try to indoctrinate us with ideas whatsoever, but is continually striving to get us to speak for ourselves and think also for ourselves.”53 She relished Crockett’s poised, formal diction and donnish sense of humor.
Unlike most high school English teachers, Crockett encouraged his students to write and send their work to national magazines. Rejection slips were to be regarded as “battle scars that precede the victory of publication.”54 Sylvia took his advice to heart: she sent out more than fifty stories before her first Seventeen acceptance in 1950.55 Aurelia remembered that during their first parent-teacher conference, Crockett told her that Sylvia would “be able to make writing her profession.”56 Here was someone who recognized her daughter’s enormous potential. When Plath published her first poetry collection, The Colossus, in 1960, she sent her former mentor an inscribed copy that read, “To Mr. Crockett, in whose classroom and wisdom these poems have root.” To her, he was “the teacher of a lifetime.”57
Plath’s skepticism toward the stifling norms of the 1950s also took root in Crockett’s class. As she wrote in one assignment,
In our era of cellophane-wrapped food, of deep freezes and television sets, we may not only buy things, but we may also purchase ideas and ideals, neatly packaged and labeled according to their contents. “Ladies and gentlemen, you see before you a selection of political opinions. Choose what you will, and fight for your possession. Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Facism [sic]. Names, names, names.”
Truly there are “masked words” abroad, and masked words have a strange, hypnotic power over us. Instead of asking oneself, “What does this term mean; what are the laws, the real ideals behind it?” we lazily accept the word and use it thoughtlessly in our own speech….We are skeptical about the value of our own thought.58
Crockett’s pacifism strengthened Plath’s own. Pacifist ideas began to appear in her creative and academic work in the late 1940s. In April 1948, she published a front-page article in The Bradford titled “The Atomic Threat.”59 A year later, in March 1949, she wrote an antiwar poem, “Seek No More the Young,” modeled on the World War I verse of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon:
They came, the iron men; their rifles whined,
And some fell limp upon the spattered stone –
The light extinguished and their eyes glazed blind.
But oh! the eyes of those alive—alone!
The tortured panic of the world was there.
Ah! seek no more the young with golden hair.60
Veiled diatribes against war found their way into a 1948–49 English paper on Romeo and Juliet, which quickly turned into a meditation on “the theme of all wars: two groups being in a deadly battle of extermination for a trumped-up reason.” In the margin, Crockett challenged Plath, writing, “always?” For her, the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets symbolized Cold War aggression: “No one pauses to investigate the absurd little cause of the struggle. The aim is to devastate the opposing side, and that aim is all important….That is the sadness of all wars.”61
In other papers for Crockett, she was drawn to taboo subjects like adultery, madness, and suicide. During her tenth-grade year, she wrote about several novels and short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Gothic explorations of Puritan sin fascinated her. She found Hester Prynne, from The Scarlet Letter, a “regal, full-blooded” woman, though Dimmesdale “moved me not to pity, but rather to scorn….I feel a strong contempt for his weakness.”62 Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” may have inspired her later portrait of “Lady Lazarus”: Plath wrote that she was “caught in the spell” of “the idea of a woman so nourished by poison, that her very breath or touch was fatal to other human beings,” though she was “disappointed to find the typical Hawthorne climax—a moral.”63 In her later letters and journals, Plath would frequently refer to Rappaccini’s daughter. “The Minister’s Black Veil” also intrigued her: “Every one of us has a veil. Sometimes we succeed in covering our inner selves so thoroughly that it is difficult for us to pierce our own veil.”64
During her sophomore year with Crockett, she read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It was her “first encounter” with stream-of-consciousness narrative, and the effect was “electrifying.” “At first you thought, ‘What a jumbled conglomeration of vague shapes and shadows!’ But as the faint light rose and increased, strange tints were revealed, and a glossy depth was apparent in the furnishings.”65 Her favorite character in the novel was not Mrs. Dalloway but Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked Great War veteran who commits suicide. His understanding of evil’s hidden but pervasive presence in “civilized”
society spoke to her. She also wrote a short report on the 1948 film The Snake Pit (based on the novel by Mary Jane Ward) about a schizophrenic writer’s experiences in a mental hospital. Sylvia felt the film took an admirable moral stand in its depiction of the mentally ill. “There was no suggestion of embarrassed laughter at the sight of ‘crazy people,’ ” she wrote, “but rather a feeling of compassion.” This novel and movie eventually influenced her decision to write about her own experiences at McLean Hospital in The Bell Jar. “Must get out SNAKE PIT,” she wrote in her journal in July 1959. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.”66 Indeed, The Snake Pit’s message, as Plath wrote in her high school report, was very similar to that of The Bell Jar: “In this woman’s fight for her sanity, we see the struggle of the individual against the institution.”67
* * *
UNDER WILBURY CROCKETT’S TUTELAGE, Plath began serving her literary apprenticeship in earnest. She wrote papers that dug deep into the technicalities of dactylic and anapestic meter, masculine and feminine rhyme schemes, liquid and sibilant consonants, villanelles, sonnets, rime royal, ottava rima, and rondeau. She explored how poets used particular meters and rhymes to achieve a desired aural effect. At times, she almost seemed to be writing about her own future work; when she writes of Walter de la Mare’s “The Listener,” for example—“The rhythm suggests the sound of distant hoofbeats: now soft, now loud, it fits in perfectly with the mood of the poem”—we are reminded of what has often been said about her technique in “Ariel.”68
She created her own twenty-one-page “Anthology of American Poetry” for Crockett, which featured poems by H.D., Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale (who had the most entries with five poems), and others.69 Some of the poems she chose sound like precursors of “Ariel,” in which the speaker flies with her mare into the sun, the “cauldron of morning”: Amy Lowell’s “Night Clouds” tells of a white mare with “golden hoofs” who flies into the heavens. (“Fly, mares!” Lowell writes. “Or the tiger sun will leap upon you and destroy you.”) In “The Sea Gypsy” Richard Hovey writes of flying, by sail, into the sunset on a “trail of rapture.” “Who Am I?” by Carl Sandburg looks forward to the austere, authoritative poetic voice in poems like Plath’s “Elm”:
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
She included two poems about depression—Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” in which a wealthy man who is the envy of the town shoots himself, and Robert Frost’s “Desert Places,” in which an “absent-spirited” speaker traveling through a snowy field describes his numbingly white surroundings:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Plath’s 1963 “Sheep in Fog,” with its bleak imagery of whiteness, absence, and stars, would evoke a similar mood.
The introspective, sorrowful lilt of her high school poems was probably due to the heady influence of the Romantic and early modernist literature she was reading with Crockett; first-person speakers rarely made appearances in Plath’s work before 1946, but after she began taking Crockett’s class, they crowd her poems. She also made a pointed metaphorical shift from spring to autumn, which she found a more appropriate season to illuminate her speakers’ Romantic despondency. Excited by her new theme, she circled back repeatedly to imagery of dead, dry leaves, gray dawns, fog, and cold rain. In “Reverie,” the “autumn wind laughed through the bare trees / with a hollow sound”; in “Let the Rain Fall Gently,” she writes, “Let the rain fall with a whisper / On the leaves and on the ground”; in “Wild Geese,” “The only sound is the rattle and scrape / Of withered leaves down the windswept street”; and in “Bereft,” “the thin rains fall, / And autumn is lonely and bitter brown.”70
“Sorrow,” which dates from 1947, is a good example of how she was learning to use nature as an objective correlative for her speaker’s moods:
Oh, no one in the world was kin
To me or my sorrow.
“Just wait,” they said complacently,
“Your sun will shine tomorrow.”
But all last night the rain came down,
Monotonous and musical,
Till, in the timid grey of dawn,
I heard its murmuring grow still.
Alas, tomorrow has arrived;
My lonely heart still grieves,
But I have found my solace in
The restless sound of rain-soaked leaves.
Luxurious Keatsian despondency, touched by Teasdale, is on full display here as the poet tries her hand at Romantic self-fashioning.
Her tenth-grade poem titles suggest that she mined her sorrows for dramatic effect: “Bereft,” “Alone and Alone in the Woods Was I,” “Persecuted,” and “Wallflower.” Sometimes the speakers of these poems suffer from unrequited love, as in “Have You Forgotten?” (dedicated to Perry Norton). “Earthbound,” from 1948, also looks inward, mixing existentialism and Romanticism. “I am too oppressed by earthly things,” the speaker begins; she then complains of the “chairs and tables,” “books and pencils,” and “surface talk of friends and foes” that “crowd upon my sight.” Her final stanza summons the ghost of Young Werther, Goethe’s dark Romantic hero:
Would that I were clear of mortal dust—
Freed at last from these confining bars
To drift forever through the endless sky,
Illumined only by the thin, cold gleam of stars!
“In Passing” and “Lonely Song,” which Plath wrote in 1949 under the pseudonym Sandra Peters, likewise revel in Romantic rhetoric.
Under Crockett, Plath also read T. S. Eliot and began experimenting with modernist poetic language. During her eleventh-grade year, she wrote a long paper for him in which she analyzed sections of “The Waste Land,” “Ash Wednesday,” “Mr. Apollinax,” “The Hollow Men,” “La Figlia Che Piange,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”71 The paper, for which she received an A–, is not critically enlightening, but it is a deeply personal reflection on Eliot’s work that suggests the extent of his future influence. Though Plath bemoaned her “lack of insight” and “ignorance” concerning the origins of Eliot’s allusions, she admitted that she had found “little oases” of “revelation and beauty” within his work, and defended him as a lyric master. One did not need to understand all of Eliot’s erudite allusions to enjoy his poetry, she argued. She liked the Cockney slang of “A Game of Chess,” writing, “all this one hears daily on busses, trams and street cars. The hollow jargon of our country.”
Plath valued Eliot’s “striking irony”—his ability to render deep pathos through absurdity, as in Prufrock’s “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” She lauded his technical ability as well, noting that he was “a master for making the rhythm of his lines conform to his needs.” Critics would eventually point out her own ability to master poetic momentum through rhythm. Indeed, her depiction of death in Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” almost reads like a critical description of her own poem “Edge”: “Eliot transcends the terror and has a ‘mystical vision of the serenity that will follow upon release from the body; even the very agents of dissolution themselves no longer seem terrifying, but are merged into the radiance of death become life.’ ”
She ended her paper with a meditation on Eliot’s “Preludes,” the one work by Eliot that she included in her anthology for Crockett. “Preludes” follows a young, disaffected poet-speaker as he navigates his way through “grimy
scraps” and “newspapers from vacant lots” in Boston’s slums, bearing witness to “the burnt-out ends of smoky days.” Eliot’s poem, itself heavily influenced by the French symbolism of Jules Laforgue, struck a modern note when it was published in 1920 for the way it married a Romantic quest with the urban imagery of squalor: “broken blinds,” “dingy shades,” “smells of beer,” “muddy feet”—“The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted.” She was struck by this unlikely marriage, and ended her paper by aligning Eliot’s “realism” with D. H. Lawrence’s. In Eliot, Plath found someone who reveled in the juxtaposition of high and low, placing the sordid and the lyrical side by side in fragile tandem, just as she would in her poems. Here was a new model—a poet who could seamlessly allude to Shakespearean tragedy and a slavey’s abortion in the same poem.
Plath’s “City Streets,” written for Crockett in November 1947, explores the metaphoric potential of urban debris in imagistic free verse:
A yellow fog slinks low along the ground
And clings to the dingy brick walls of the tenements
that crowd by the gutter.
A damp newspaper somersaults along with the wind
And then succumbs on the flat pavement, lonely, left behind.
Blue spirals of smoke curl out of the sooty factory chimneys.
A lean gray cat sulks around a rubbish heap,
Red Comet Page 18
