"Two Sweet Ladies": Sexton and Plath's Friendship and Mutual Influence

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2006 by Trinidad, David

The class is good. I am learning leaps and boundaries. Tho I am very bitchy acting in class. I don't know why but I am very defensive around Lowell (I think I am afraid of him) ... so I act like a bitch with these sarcastic remarks ... The class just sits there like little doggies waggling their heads at his every statement. For instance, he will be dissecting some great poem and wilt say "why is this line so good. What makes it good?" and there is total silence. Everyone afraid to speak. And finally, because I can stand it no longer, I speak up saying, "I don't think it's so good at all. You would never allow us sloppy language like that." .. . and so forth. But I don't do this for effect. But because the line isn't good. What do you do-sit there and agree and nod and say nothing ...?... As you say, I do act aggressive.

On February 1 she writes Snodgrass: "Lowell is really helping me ... he likes the looks of my 'book,' with some critical reservations, and has shown it to Stanley Kunitz ... who ... agree[s] with his enthusiasm ... He is going to show it to somebody Ford at Knopf this week to see if he would be interested. And Houghton Mifflin wants to see it... in total he likes my work a lot... ." Enough to also share it with Randall Jarrell, among others. Lowell coaches her on which poems to delete from the manuscript, encourages her to replace them with new ones. Though Sexton puts the word "book" in quotes, indicating she's not sure it is yet a book, she's already calling it To Bedlam and Part Way Back, a title that would stick. A few days later, February 5, Sexton writes poet Carolyn Kizer that Lowell is "pushing me to send out fat groups [of poems] to the big places," that is, the most visible literary magazines.

In the midst of all this exciting tutelage, February 1959, Sylvia Plath began auditing Lowell's poetry class. Plath, living in Boston with husband Ted Hughes, and still very much in his shadow, had recently finished a year of teaching at Smith College. From the February 25 entry in her journal: "Lowcll's class yesterday a great disappointment: I said a few mealymouthed things, a few BU students yattered nothings I wouldn't let my Smith freshmen say without challenge. Lowell good in his mildly feminine ineffectual fashion. Felt a regression. The main thing is hearing the other student's poems & his reaction to mine." Unhappy at first with the workshop, Plath perked up when Lowell started comparing her work to Sexton's. Lowell suspected, perhaps intuitively, and ultimately correctly, that they might benefit from each other's differences. Plath's journal, March 20: "Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell's class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann [missing the 'e'j Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff." That looseness-in person as well as on paper-was a potential antidote to Plath's compulsive togetherness. Kathleen Spivack, then nineteen and a student in the class, remembers Plath as "curt and businesslike," as "reserved and totally controlled as well as unapproachable to the younger writers." She was "composed, neat, held in, in a tightly buttoned print blouse and neat cardigan. She spoke quietly, with utmost control." In contrast, Sexton "was often late, and wore splashy, flowing dresses and flashy jewelry. Her hoarse voice breathed extravagant enthusiasm and life. Her hands shook when she read her poems aloud. She smoked endlessly. Anne's poems were ragged; they flew off the page. She was an instinctual poet rather than, as Sylvia, a trained one." In class, Sexton named William Carlos Williams as a favorite poet; Plath, Wallace Stevens. Their own poems, at this time, reflect their preferences: Sexton's are personal, colloquial, direct; whereas Plath's are intellectual, mythological, and formally complex. These stylistic differences were clear to Plath. From her journal, April 23: "She [Ann Sexton, the Ann again without its 'e'] has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty." Sexton poems Plath would have read or seen workshopped include "The Double Image" (Sexton's painfully open and seamlessly crafted sequence about her mother's death from cancer and her separation, due to breakdown, from her infant daughter; both answer and homage to "Heart's Needle," a Snodgrass sequence Sexton deeply admired) and "You, Doctor Martin" (a signature madness piece, with its unforgettable admission: "Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself"). Plath was writing such poems as the stilted "Electra on Azalea Path" and the gimmicky "Metaphors," two poems that would fail to make their way into the American edition of her first book, The Colossus.