14. SP to WP, 9 July 1958. L2, 262.
15. TH to AP, early July 1958. LTH, 127–28. He may have been referring to “Whiteness I Remember” and “Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers.”
16. Plath probably wrote “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” in early June 1958, for she included it in an 11 June 1958 letter to Warren. Hughes’s “Relic” was written by April 1958.
17. CPTH, 78.
18. SP to WP, 11 June 1958. L2, 243.
19. SP to WP, 25 June 1958. L2, 252.
20. SP to WP, 11 June 1958. L2, 238.
21. Plath later changed the title to “Night Walk” and, still later, to “Hardcastle Crags.”
22. SP to WP, 25 June 1958. L2, 252.
23. SP to AP, 25 June 1958. L2, 249.
24. SP to WP, 9 July 1958. L2, 261.
25. SP to AP, 1 Aug. 1958. L2, 267.
26. SP to Peter Davison, 7 Sept. 1958. L2, 275.
27. J, 394–95.
28. SP to AP, 13 Aug. 1958. L2, 270. Plath read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, while Hughes read her Under the Sea Wind.
29. OHP to AP, 30 July 1958. Lilly.
30. J, 422.
31. SP to AP, 5 July 1958. L2, 259.
32. Ibid., L2, 259–60.
33. J, 409.
34. J, 406.
35. Moore inscribed the date 16 Apr. 1955. Plath’s copy of this book is at SPC, Smith.
36. J, 406.
37. Marianne Moore to SP, 13 July 1958. 17.35, SPC, Smith.
38. Marianne Moore to Judith Jones, 7 Apr. 1962. Alfred A. Knopf Papers, 359.10, HRC.
39. Marianne Moore to Henry Allen Moe, Nov. 1961. Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA.
40. CPTH, 1091.
41. SP to AP, 19 July 1958. L2, 266.
42. J, 395.
43. J, 400–405.
44. J, 401.
45. J, 404.
46. J, 409.
47. J, 410.
48. J, 411.
49. SP to AP, 1 Aug. 1958. L2, 267.
50. TH to Gerald and Joan Hughes, Christmas 1958. 1.2, MSS 854, Emory.
51. SP to Olwyn Hughes, 30 June 1958. L2, 255.
52. J, 411.
53. J, 412.
54. J, 413. The magazine’s other acceptance, eventually titled “Hardcastle Crags” in The Colossus, appeared in The New Yorker on 11 Oct. 1958.
55. J, 409.
56. J, 415.
57. J, 416.
58. SP to WP, 25 June 1958. L2, 253.
59. SP to Dorothea Krook, 25 Sept. 1958. L2, 281.
60. SP to Lynne Lawner, 4 Sept. 1958. L2, 273.
61. SP to Elinor Friedman, 3 Sept. 1958. L2, 271.
62. SP to Dorothea Krook, 25 Sept. 1958. L2, 280.
63. TH to Olwyn Hughes, summer 1959. Add MS 88948/1/2, BL.
64. SP to Dorothea Krook, 25 Sept. 1958. L2, 281.
65. J, 421.
66. TH to William Scammell, 28 Apr. 1998. Add MS 88918/137, BL.
67. J, 420; 423; 445.
68. SP to Elinor Friedman, 3 Sept. 1958. L2, 272.
69. J, 423.
70. J, 421.
71. J, 420–21.
72. J, 423.
73. J, 422.
74. SP to Elinor Friedman, 26 Oct. 1958. L2, 283.
75. SP to Dorothea Krook, 25 Sept. 1958. L2, 282.
76. T. S. Eliot to TH, 30 Oct. 1958. Series 6, OP 12, MSS 644, Emory.
77. SP to Lynne Lawner, 4 Sept. 1958. L2, 274.
78. SP to Alice Norma Davis, 24 Sept. 1958. L2, 278.
79. J, 424.
80. SP to Elinor Friedman, 26 Oct. 1958. L2, 283.
81. J, 424.
82. J, 441.
83. Andrew Lytle to SP, 27 Nov. 1961. Sewanee Review Records, UA20.01, University Archives, Jesse Ball DuPont Library, Sewanee University.
84. SP, Notes on Falcon Yard, “Character Notebook.” 116.1, on back of TH’s Bardo Thodol, MSS 644, Emory.
85. J, 429.
86. J, 431–32.
87. J, 429–32.
88. J, 448.
89. Plath biographer Anne Stevenson also questioned Dr. Beuscher’s tactics. “In Boston, Beuscher gave Sylvia ‘permission to hate’ her mother—rather extreme, don’t you think, to give an impressionable girl permission to ‘hate’ her mother, even though this particular mother, by doing right may actually have perpetrated wrong? A more mature psychiatrist would have realized that the hatred of a mother and the love of the father aren’t so simple as the Electra complex formula would have them be. Sylvia clearly took everything Ruth Beuscher told her to heart.” Anne Stevenson, interview with Cynthia Harvey, Cortland Review 14 (Nov. 2000).
90. J, 451.
91. J, 444–45.
92. J, 454.
93. Ibid.
94. J, 437.
95. J, 451.
96. Corinne Robins, “Four Young Poets,” Mademoiselle (Jan. 1959): 32–35.
97. J, 434.
98. J, 445.
99. Gordon Lameyer to SP, 21 May 1959. Lilly.
100. J, 452.
101. J, 459.
102. Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977; 1991), 56.
103. Sexton, Letters, 64.
104. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Stephen Fassett, 1971. 1.26, MSS 1489, Emory.
105. J, 465.
106. Stanley Kunitz to Edward Butscher, 17 Aug. 1973. 1.38, EBC, Smith.
107. TH to Olwyn Hughes, late Oct./early Nov. 1958. 1.6, MSS 980, Emory.
108. Peter Davison to Judith Flanders, 9 Nov. 1987. 1.7, Houghton Mifflin Papers, Smith.
109. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 156.
110. Adrienne Rich to Jack Sweeney, 20 Feb. 1959. LA52/287, Jack and Máire Sweeney Papers, UCD.
111. Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, 156.
112. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Ruth Whitman, 1970. 4.22, MSS 1489, Emory.
113. Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 111.
114. Ibid.
115. J, 466.
116. J, 469.
117. J, 471.
118. Adrienne Rich to Jack Sweeney, 20 Feb. 1959. LA52/287, Jack and Máire Sweeney Papers, UCD.
119. Peter Davison, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath (New York: Knopf, 1994), 11.
120. Adrienne Rich, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Sandra M. Gilbert, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 9.
121. Quoted in Davison, The Fading Smile, 2.
122. Ibid., 3.
123. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 295.
124. Lowell read “Waking in the Blue,” about his time at McLean, out loud at his Boston University seminar, which Plath took. “Skunk Hour” was published in Partisan Review in Jan. 1958, along with “Man and Wife” and “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” More poems would see publication in Jan. 1959.
125. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.
126. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 191–92. Lowell’s ellipsis.
127. Ibid., 184; 186.
128. TH to Lucas Myers, spring 1958. 1.4, MSS 865, Emory.
129. Hughes told Olwyn that Lowell was “very apprehensive as to how it will be received and talks continually—or too ofte
n—about how it won’t be liked, how it oughtn’t to get any prizes since he has lots of money and is already established, and so on.” TH to Olwyn Hughes, Apr. 1959. 1.8, MSS 980, Emory.
130. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Jan./Feb. 1959. Add MS 88948/1/1, BL.
131. TH to William and Edith Hughes, n.d., early 1959. LTH, 139.
132. TH to Lucas Myers, spring 1958. 1.4, MSS 865, Emory.
133. In 1976, for example, Hughes wrote to Daniel Weissbort that Lowell’s work was “totally ersatz, it is all stage performance, even the careless, slovenly, loose shuffling off of imperfect approximations, on his way to closer sincerities.” LTH, 372.
134. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Jan./Feb. 1959. Add MS 88948/1/1, BL.
135. A. Alvarez, “Tough Young Poet,” Observer (6 Oct. 1957), 12.
136. Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012), 71.
137. Travisano and Hamilton, eds., Words in Air, 333.
138. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 57.
139. Ibid., 119; 122.
140. Travisano and Hamilton, eds., Words in Air, 702.
141. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 63.
142. Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 158.
143. Rachel Donadio, “1958: The War of the Intellectuals,” New York Times (11 May 2008).
144. A. Alvarez, “The Bohemian and the Beat,” Observer (23 Nov. 1958), A16.
145. Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review 25 (Spring 1958): 305–11.
146. SP to Brian Cox, 17 June 1961. L2, 625.
147. Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties, 152.
148. J, 455.
149. J, 458.
150. Eddie Cohen to SP, 2 Nov. 1958. Lilly.
151. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Marcia Brown Stern, 1972. 4.16, MSS 1489, Emory.
152. J, 466.
153. J, 463.
154. J, 469.
155. J, 469–70.
156. J, 471.
157. TH to William Scammell, 28 Apr. 1998. Add MS 88918/137, BL.
158. J, 470.
159. SP to Gerald and Joan Hughes, 24 May 1959. L2, 321.
160. TH to Olwyn Hughes, early 1959. 1.8, MSS 980, Emory.
161. J, 467.
162. The class is rumored to have met in Room 222, but the English department’s administrator, who worked at BU from 1948 to 2008, confirmed that Lowell was assigned to “random, generic classrooms in the CAS building” when he taught. See Caleb Daniloff, “Icons Among Us: Room 222,” BU Today (1 Dec. 2009). Sexton had been attending the class since it began in the fall of 1958 at the suggestion of W. D. Snodgrass, whom she had met at the Antioch Writers Conference.
163. J, 471.
164. See Plath’s 1962 interview with Peter Orr in The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, Peter Orr, ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 168.
165. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 26.
166. Ibid., 50; 47.
167. Ibid., 33.
168. Ibid., 25.
169. Ibid., 35–36.
170. Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 107.
171. SP to Lynne Lawner, 11 Mar. 1959. L2, 303.
172. Maxine Kumin, “How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton,” foreword, Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (New York: Mariner Books, 1981), xxiv.
173. Travisano and Hamilton, eds., Words in Air, 327.
174. TH to Al Alvarez, Jan. 1962. Add MS 88593/1, BL.
175. Middlebrook, Anne Sexton, 340.
176. Ibid., 339.
177. SP to Lynne Lawner, 11 Mar. 1959. L2, 303.
178. J, 475.
179. J, 477.
180. SP to Lynne Lawner, 11 Mar. 1959. L2, 303.
181. Sexton, Letters, 70–71.
182. SP to Lynne Lawner, 11 Mar. 1959. L2, 305.
183. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 28.
184. Sexton, Complete Poems, 4.
185. Orr, The Poet Speaks, 168.
186. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 29.
187. SP to Lynne Lawner, 11 Mar. 1959. L2, 305.
188. J, 470.
189. J, 473.
190. J, 474.
191. Ibid.
192. J, 475–76.
193. TH, “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” TriQuarterly (Fall 1966): 81–88. 84.
194. Sexton’s poems of motherhood, such as “The Double Image” and “The Fortress,” would influence Plath’s “Magi,” “Parliament Hill Fields,” and “Morning Song.” Sexton also used the “bell jar” metaphor in her poem “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further” (“I tapped my own head; / it was glass, an inverted bowl”), though Plath had already encountered the image in Generation of Vipers. Sexton’s poem itself was a response to John Holmes’s advice to her to stop writing about personal, traumatic experiences.
195. Anne Sexton, “The Barfly Ought to Sing,” TriQuarterly 7 (Fall 1966): 92.
196. Sexton, Letters, 73.
197. J, 483.
198. Sexton, Complete Poems, 128.
199. Sexton, “The Barfly Ought to Sing,” 92.
200. Spivack, With Robert Lowell, 36–37.
201. TH to Olwyn Hughes, summer 1958. 1.6, MSS 980, Emory.
202. TH to Lucas Myers, 19 May 1959. LTH, 145.
203. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Apr. 1959. 1.8, MSS 980, Emory.
204. TH to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July, 1998. Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (London: British Library, 2012), 269.
205. TH to Daniel Weissbort, 21 Mar. 1959. LTH, 140.
206. TH to Daniel Huws, 3 Dec. 1959. LTH, 152.
207. TH to Robert Lowell, 29 Dec. 1966. LTH, 265.
22. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY
1. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Apr. 1959. LTH, 141–42.
2. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Apr./May 1959. Add MS 88948/1/1, BL.
3. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Jan./Feb. 1959. Add MS 88948/1/1, BL.
4. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Aug. 1959. Add MS 88948/1/1, BL.
5. TH, notebook entry, 12 Apr. 1959. Add MS 88918/129/2, BL.
6. J, 477.
7. J, 477–78.
8. J, 477.
9. J, 494.
10. J, 480.
11. JP, 340–52.
12. J, 495.
13. Ibid.
14. J, 484.
15. J, 485.
16. J, 487.
17. J, 491–92.
18. J, 487.
19. Ibid.
20. J, 492–94.
21. J, 492.
22. J, 492–93; SP to Ann Davidow, 12 June 1959. L2, 328.
23. Stanley Burnshaw to Robert Frost, 23 June 1959. 1178.2.24, Dartmouth.
24. Stanley Burnshaw to Robert Frost, 9 July 1959. 1178.2.24, Dartmouth.
25. J, 495. Patricia Blake, “I Was Afraid to Be a Woman” and Eugene D. Fleming, “Psychiatry and Beauty” were both published in Cosmopolitan, June 1959. Luke Ferretter has discussed these articles’ significance in Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study, pp. 43–47.
26. SP to Ann Davidow, 12 June 1959. L2, 328.
27. J, 500–501.
28. J, 500.
29. See David Trinidad, “On the Road with Sylvia and Ted: Plath and Hughes’s 1959 Road Trip Across America,” Plath Profiles 4 (Summer 2011): 168–92.
30. “She started with us that morning / We set off to roam through across America.” TH, draft of “Delivering Frieda.” Add MS 88918/1/2-8, BL.
&nbs
p; 31. SP to AP, 9 July 1959. L2, 332.
32. SP to AP, 12 July 1959. L2, 336.
33. Ibid., L2, 335.
34. SP to AP, 14 July 1959. L2, 338.
35. Karen Kukil and Stephen Ennis, No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry (New York: Grolier Club, 2005), 31.
36. CPTH, 1095–98.
37. SP to AP, 18 July 1959. L2, 340.
38. SP to AP and WP, 28 July 1959. L2, 346.
39. CPTH, 1104.
40. Ibid., 1101. Although Hughes depicted Plath as six weeks pregnant in his poem “Grand Canyon,” set later that summer, this was probably a point made in hindsight. Only a blood test could confirm a pregnancy in 1959, and Plath did not see a doctor until she returned to Wellesley.
41. TH and SP to AP and WP, 28 July 1959. Lilly.
42. SP to AP, 26 July 1959. L2, 343.
43. SP to AP, 2 Aug. 1959. L2, 349.
44. SP to AP, 26 July 1959. L2, 344.
45. TH to Edith and William Hughes, late July 1959. 1.18, MSS 980, Emory.
46. Frieda Heinrichs to AP, 13 Aug. 1959. Lilly.
47. Ibid.
48. SP to AP, 2 Aug. 1959. L2, 350.
49. SP to AP and WP, 3 Aug. 1959. L2, 351.
50. Frieda Heinrichs to AP, 13 Aug. 1959. Lilly.
51. SP to AP and WP, 3 Aug. 1959. L2, 351.
52. SP to AP and WP, 6 Aug. 1959. L2, 352.
53. SP to AP and WP, 8 Aug. 1959. L2, 353.
54. TH to AP and WP, 14 Aug. 1959. LTH, 152.
55. CPTH, 1105.
56. LH, 352.
57. Pauline Hanson to Edward Butscher, 27 Nov. 1972. 2.87, EBC, Smith.
58. Alfred Kazin to Elizabeth Ames, 3 Feb. 1955. 374.1–9, Yaddo Records, NYPL. Plath’s former Smith professor Newton Arvin invited her to Yaddo. Both Plath and Hughes received A grades on their application from John Cheever, and two B grades from their other recommenders.
59. SP to AP and WP, 10 Sept. 1959. L2, 356.
60. Ibid.
61. A Century at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs: Corporation of Yaddo, 2000), 43.
62. SP to AP and WP, c. 18 Sept. 1959. L2, 359.
63. J, 501–502.
64. HC phone interview with Howard Rogovin, 21 Jan. 2017. When the mansion closed for the season, they took their meals in the less opulent “garage.”
65. SP to Edith and William Hughes, 8 Oct. 1959. L2, 363.
66. SP to AP and WP, 10 Sept. 1959. L2, 356.
67. Ibid.
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