Sexton complained to W. D. Snodgrass about Boston’s literary parties—“It is politics and as bad as the University itself….‘who do you know’ and ‘do you have a new book in process’ ”—but Plath enjoyed them.103 She and Hughes socialized with Philip Booth, the Fassetts, the Sweeneys, and Richard Wilbur. Stephen Fassett remembered that Sylvia did not speak of herself as a poet at first; she came “trailing along as Ted’s wife.” But he soon got to know her as a brilliant “scholar who knew everything…lots of fun to talk to—together they were marvelous.” He especially remembered her “eagerness towards life: a not unpleasant greed for good things.”104 Lowell and Hardwick came to dinner at Willow Street and told chummy stories about Dylan Thomas over slices of Plath’s lemon meringue pie. Lowell was one of the few poets Plath did not regard with contempt or jealousy. Compared to “the gimmicky Cummings” and the “bland” Wilbur, she found him “like good strong shocking brandy after a too lucidly sweet dinner wine.”105 She was thrilled to call him a dinner guest. The couple also sometimes saw Stanley Kunitz, who remembered Plath as “amiable but secretive during the course of her visits with Ted to my Cambridge apartment—he did the talking.” Kunitz would later recommend Plath’s first book, The Colossus, for publication, barring “one or two poems that were too clearly derivative from Roethke.”106 In late October, Plath and Hughes spent the evening at Lowell’s place, along with Robert Frost, a living legend who, Hughes said, “monologued very pleasantly until about 2 a. m.” and was “very amusing, extremely human, a bit tough.”107 They met Frost again at Peter Davison’s attic apartment on November 11. At the end of the evening, Plath, Hughes, and Davison walked Frost back to his home. Davison remembered that Frost “clearly took a shine to Ted,” but that Plath “kept very quiet while the two male poets spoke of Edward Thomas and the English countryside, of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.”108
Plath saw Adrienne Rich occasionally in these circles. Like Kunitz, Rich felt Plath “was Ted’s wife first, and a poet only after that.”109 Rich wrote to Jack Sweeney in late February that she was looking forward to spending an upcoming evening with “Ted and Sylvia Hughes,” though she mentioned only Hughes’s poetry.110 Plath once asked Rich, who had two small children, whether it was possible to combine writing and motherhood. Rich told her, “Yes, but it’s hellishly difficult.”111 Plath expressed similar anxieties about writing and motherhood to Ruth Whitman, a Jewish poet and mother of two she had met through the Fassetts. “Dare she have children? She was terrified that it would get in the way of her poetry.” They spoke of “practically nothing else” when they got together. Whitman encouraged Plath to have children, saying, “If you stay in your narrow space, you’ll find yourself writing about the same things over and over again.”112 Rich later admitted, “What I wanted to tell her was ‘Don’t try,’ because I was in such despondency…I couldn’t foresee a future different from the past two years of raising children and being almost continuously angry.”113
In a less sexist time, Rich might have been Plath’s ally and confidante, but in 1959 Rich was too much a rival. And perhaps Rich herself was less welcoming to Plath than she might have been, for Rich admitted that she felt “threatened” when she met Anne Sexton in 1959: “There was little support for the idea that another woman poet could be a source of strength or mutual engagement…if she was going to take up space, then I was not going to have that space.”114 Plath rarely mentions Rich in her letters or journals, but she admired her poems: “they stimulate me: they are easy, yet professional.”115 If she did not work more “philosophy” into her poetry, she felt, she would always “lag behind ACR.”116
Although Plath had poems published in The Spectator and accepted by The London Magazine in early January 1959—“The Disquieting Muses,” “Lorelei,” and “Snakecharmer” would appear in the March issue—she was troubled by her poetry manuscript’s rejection that month from David Keightley’s World Publishing. She blamed herself for writing about “too many dreams, shadowy underworlds.” It was another reason to follow Rich’s lead, yet she longed to stay true to her own voice. She admonished herself for writing poems about “the baby gods…the moon-mothers, the mad maudlins, the lorelei, the hermits,” rather than the “real world” of “blood, lust and death.”117 In her best poems, Plath would fuse both strategies, and use the power of myth to illuminate personal triumphs and sorrows.
While Plath was trying to sound like Rich, Rich herself was following Lowell’s lead and attempting to find “a new freedom of expression,” as she told Sweeney in February 1959.118 Just as Hughes and his friends had become impatient with the genteel verse of the Movement in Britain, American poets had grown weary of elaborate form. “Young poets in the mid-1950s,” Peter Davison remembered, “still overshadowed by the sequoias of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, had taken refuge in a formal elegance that they were beginning to outgrow.”119 Rich agreed: “In those years, formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up bare-handed.”120 Rich and Lowell, by the late fifties, knew something needed to change. As Lowell wrote, “Poets of my generation and particularly younger ones have gotten terribly proficient at these forms. They write a very musical, difficult poem with tremendous skill….It’s become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be some breakthrough back into life.”121
Lowell’s Life Studies, which Davison called “the most influential book of American poetry for a generation,” provided that breakthrough.122 Life Studies was the answer to the dilemma Lowell had posited to Elizabeth Bishop in 1959: “My trouble seems (just one angle for looking at it) to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can’t survive or write without both but they need to come to terms. Rather narrow walking.”123 Lowell’s collection was published in the spring of 1959, but Plath and Hughes had already read some of his new poems that winter.124 Hughes’s similar desire to “break through” probably made Plath more responsive to Lowell’s work. Daniel Huws remembered Ted “pointing out in The Colossus a couple of poems which he thought were the beginning of something new. ‘Mushrooms.’ I think he helped liberate her from the models she’d followed before.”125
In Life Studies, Lowell—who would experience at least twenty manic episodes and hospitalizations—wrote about depression, suicide, mental hospitals, and familial inheritances. In “Skunk Hour,” his most famous poem, he channels Milton: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat…./ I myself am hell; / nobody’s here—.”126 He wrote of McLean’s “locked razor” in “Waking in the Blue,” lobotomized jail mates in “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” and returning “frizzled, stale and small” from the asylum in “Home After Three Months Away.”127 Plath had endured similar experiences but had never dared confront them in her poems. Lowell dared.
Hughes kept himself at a slight remove from Boston’s poetry scene. Yet he found Lowell’s new verse “exciting.”128 The two were close enough that Lowell gave Hughes the manuscript of Life Studies to read before it was published, and confided in him about his anxieties regarding its reception.129 Ted told Olwyn he thought parts of Life Studies “marvelous,” though he noted that it was “autobiographical” and predicted that “not many people will like it.”130 To his parents he called Lowell “easily the best of all the Americans under fifty—easily and far away. He goes into the mental hospital now and again….However he’s about the most charming and likeable American I’ve ever met.”131 (Indeed, after meeting Lowell in Boston in 1958, he had written to Luke Myers, “his whole tempo is perfect Botolph.”)132 Although Hughes’s enthusiasm for Lowell would wane over the years, in 1959 he shared Lowell’s belief that modern poetry needed to be revitalized from an inner source, whether traumatic personal experience or nature’s primal life force.133 He boasted to his parents and sister that Lowell considered
his poem “Pike” “ ‘a masterpiece,’ ‘immortal,’ and ‘a new way of writing.’ ”134 Al Alvarez, poetry critic at The Observer from 1959 to 1977, noted Lowell’s influence in his review of The Hawk in the Rain (“Lowell prowls about”).135
Boston in the 1950s was, as one contemporary observed, a well-mannered society in which gay men were “clubbed to death in the bushes” and lesbians were “unthinkable”: “Mental hospitals flourished.”136 That the man writing poems of madness and mental hospitals hailed from one of the most prominent families in Boston mattered. (The joke went that Harvard was a Lowell “family business.”) Lowell gave others courage, and permission, to follow his example. Elizabeth Bishop explained the dilemma in a 1960 letter to Lowell. It bothered her, she wrote, that so many women writers—Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Katherine Anne Porter, and Anne Sexton—belonged to “ ‘our beautiful old silver’ school of female writing…They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that this nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say.” They had to mitigate their unwomanly literary calling by confirming that they were “nice,” Bishop said.137 Her perceptive comment cuts to the heart of Plath’s dilemma at mid-century.
The poet Kathleen Spivack, a Lowell protégé, recalled the obstacles for women writers in a Puritan city overshadowed by Harvard. “The field was full of misogyny.”138 Even Lowell, one of Elizabeth’s Bishop’s best friends, chose women for his poetry workshop on the basis of looks, Spivack said; in class, he spoke of all women poets, even Bishop, as “minor.”139 The situation had hardly improved a decade later in 1971, when Lowell told the British critic Ian Hamilton, “Few women write major poetry. Can I make this generalization? Only four stand with our best men: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.” Such condescension angered Bishop, who told Lowell, “I’d rather be called ‘the 16th poet’ with no reference to my sex, than one of 4 women—even if the other three are pretty good.”140 Spivack, who attended Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, thought that both Plath and Rich had managed not to offend “Boston propriety and male prerogative” by “being worshipful and self-effacing.”141 Rich had won the Yale Younger Poets prize when she was a Radcliffe undergraduate, but at Harvard she was not allowed to take upper-level English classes, which were only for men.
Lowell was not the only poet breaking taboo in the late 1950s. There may have been a less obvious “confessional” poetic influence on Plath—the Beats. In 1959, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso visited Lowell for the first time in his Boston apartment. Lowell and Ginsberg began corresponding, each accusing the other of missing the point of good poetry. They would not meet again until 1977, when they gave a joint reading at Saint Mark’s Church in Greenwich Village. By then, the two seemed more like collaborators than antagonists. Each had helped loosen the parameters of American poetry and popularize the “raw” over the “cooked,” as Lowell famously put it in his 1960 National Book Award acceptance speech for Life Studies.
Plath, in England, would have missed most of the publicity that surrounded the publication of Howl in 1956 and its obscenity trial in 1957. By the time she returned, however, the Beats were famous, their outrageous poetry readings and Benzedrine-fueled road trips frequently described in the national papers and middlebrow magazines such as Time and Life. Plath never mentioned Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac in her letters and journal, but she would have known about On the Road, published in 1957, and The Dharma Bums in 1958. Articles about “the Beat Generation” had appeared in The New York Times as early as 1952.
The Beats had access to areas of underground experience that were mostly off-limits to middle-class white women in the 1950s. Columbia’s proximity to Harlem meant that Kerouac and Ginsberg spent many evenings in bars and jazz clubs.142 Theirs was the free life Plath had dreamed of in her journal when she fantasized about living as a man and visiting bars and brothels. Despite her boasting about Jewish and African American friends at Cambridge, Plath’s race and gender meant she had little contact with these American subcultures. All of her poetic training had been through the university rather than the street: martinis at the Ritz were about as daring as Plath got during her year in Boston. Plath’s Germanic work ethic and sobriety bore little resemblance to the Beats’ infidelities, addictions, and dishevelments. Indeed, literary critics typically frowned on the Beats, who, says Louis Menand, were considered “not serious” by 1950s intellectuals.143 Alvarez mocked the Beats’ pretensions and “self-pity” in The Observer in November 1958, declaring them a “joke.”144 That same year, Norman Podhoretz published a scathing article about the Beats, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” in The Partisan Review.145
But Plath shared the Beats’ contempt for the middlebrow (televisions, station wagons, payment plans), which she encoded into her fictional depictions of suburbia. Corso and Ginsberg had both been patients at mental hospitals. “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” with its surrealist elements, suspicion of authority, and vision of holy madness, has a Beat sensibility, as does The Bell Jar’s suggestion that insanity is a sane response to the repressions of Cold War America. The 1953 electrocution of the Rosenbergs symbolized, for Plath, other victims of repression—radicals, Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, artists.
In 1961 Plath would try to include Corso’s “A Dreamed Realization” in a selection of American poetry for the Critical Quarterly. (In the end, she could not obtain permission.) She would also include Robert Creeley, a poet of the Black Mountain School, in the anthology. She wrote that her selection would range “from Gregory Corso to Richard Wilbur (i.e., encompassing the Beats and the Elegant Academicians). Over 15 poets. Over 20 poems.”146 Her use of the term “Elegant Academicians” was not necessarily gracious. She saw the Beats and polished poets like Wilbur on opposite poles of the aesthetic spectrum, and may have found the former a refreshing antidote to the latter by the early sixties. Like her, Beat writers sought to break out of the glass caul; they counted themselves enemies of New Criticism, which Ginsberg and Kerouac had loathed as undergraduates at Columbia. Ginsberg felt that “true art” was “uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited”—not so very different from the practice that Hughes preached.147
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SYLVIA’S TEAR-FILLED SESSIONS with Dr. Beuscher, which she called “a cleansing and an exhaustion,” left her “happy.”148 But the peace was temporary; she continued to suffer from depression and nightmares—dead babies, half-decayed corpses, graveyards, shock treatment at Valley Head—throughout January 1959. “The old sickness on me,” she wrote in her journal on January 8. She considered, again, a PhD in English at Columbia, and questioned whether she was really “the sort to stay home all day and write.”149 She read Saint Therese’s autobiography and looked up the requirements for a psychology PhD, but six more years of study was too wearisome a prospect. Lynne Lawner’s letters from Rome did not help. Lynne was living Sylvia’s dream life—attending literary salons, writing and translating poetry, learning Italian with seemingly endless amounts of money and time. Yet a surprise letter from Eddie Cohen moved her. He had vowed “to stay away,” but had read so much of her recent work he could not resist congratulating her—and apologizing for forgetting “the meaning of friendship when you needed it most….You’ve come a long way since Seventeen, but your first fan is still one of your fondest.”150
Sylvia’s depression began to lift somewhat once she began socializing. On New Year’s Eve, she and Ted attended a masquerade party at Stephen and Agatha Fassetts’ home, where Sylvia dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and Ted as the wolf. (Agatha had let Sylvia roam through her attic until she found an old sealskin coat, from which Ted made an alarmingly realistic wolf mask.) Sylvia also spent a lot of time with Marcia, who had adopted three-month-old twins. Marcia remembered that Sylvia visited her almost daily for two or three months that spring and was enormously help
ful. “She was thoroughly saturated in the experience and loved it.”151 She and Marcia cooked together and discussed motherhood and infertility—which Sylvia worried about—and Marcia taught her how to use a sewing machine. Sylvia braided a rag rug and spoke “easily about babies, fertility, amazingly frank and pleasant” with Perry Norton’s wife, Shirley. With Shirley, Sylvia felt “part of young womanhood. How odd, men don’t interest me at all now, only women and womentalk.”152
That January, she attempted a sonnet about the dead bird and finished her poem “Point Shirley,” about her grandmother—“Oddly powerful and moving to me in spite of the rigid formal structure. Evocative.”153 In February, she made another recording of her poems at the Fassett Recording Studios, and began another Winthrop poem, “Suicide Off Egg Rock.” But the poem didn’t seem to work, initially. In her journal she wrote, “set up such a strict verse form that all power was lost: my nose so close I couldn’t see what I was doing. An anesthetizing of feeling.”154 Plath did not need Robert Lowell to point out that she was using form as a crutch: “What inner decision, what inner murder or prison-break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing…and not feel this jam up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-facade of numb dumb wordage.”155 She rewrote the poem until it contained, she felt, “the neat easy ACRich lyricism.”156 Hughes thought “Suicide Off Egg Rock” inaugurated “the first phase where she began to sound a ‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘artificial’) note.”157 Plath was grappling with her own trauma, writing obliquely about her attempt to drown herself in August 1953:
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