in the year of Plath’s death in a book called The Modern Poets: An American–British Anthology, which included a real rarity in the form of a photograph of T. S. Eliot that he liked. The photograph of Ted, somewhat in Fifties Teddy-boy mode, shows him tanned, relaxed, leaning back, his tie artfully dishevelled but his hair for once swept back without the trademark lick over his forehead. His eyes melt the spectator. Ted and Sylvia were also photographed at work together: husband and wife as Team Poetry.
That spring saw the publication of Life Studies, Robert Lowell’s first new volume for eight years. It was immediately recognised as a literary landmark. For one thing, it contained a distinctive mix of poetry and short prose memoirs. For another, in contrast to the intricate formality of Lowell’s earlier work, the poems moved seamlessly between metrical regularity and free verse. The language had a new informality and the subject matter was frequently very personal.
A review in the Nation by the critic M. L. Rosenthal described the book as ‘confessional’. The name stuck and Lowell, quite unintentionally, found himself labelled as the leader of a new school of American poetry. For Ted and Sylvia, it was exciting to be around Lowell at this time. Sylvia found in Life Studies a licence to write more direct poetic confessions of her own. Ted deeply admired the technical accomplishment, but was more sceptical about the personal content. ‘He goes mad occasionally,’ Ted told Danny Weissbort in a letter about Lowell, ‘and the poems in his book, the main body of them, are written round a bout of madness, before and after. They are mainly Autobiographical.’ At the heart of the collection was ‘Waking in the Blue’, Lowell’s great poem about his period of confinement in a secure ward at the McLean mental hospital: ‘We are all old-timers, / Each of us holds a locked razor.’47 ‘AutoBiography [sic]’, Ted concluded his sermon inspired by Life Studies, was ‘the only subject matter really left to Americans’. The thing about Americans was that their only real grounding was their selves and their family, ‘Never a locality, or a community, or an organisation of ideas, or a private imagination’.48 He was thinking about Sylvia as well as Lowell.
In a letter to Luke Myers written a couple of months later, he focused on a different aspect of contemporary American poetry, reflecting on William Carlos Williams’s preoccupation with ‘sexy girls, noble whores, the flower of poverty, tough straight talk’ and describing E. E. Cummings (whom he considered a genius, a fool and a huckster) as ‘one of the first symptoms and general encouragements of the modern literary syphilis – verseless, styleless, characterless all-inclusive undifferentiated yelling assertion of the Great simplifying burden-lifting God orgasm – whether by drug, negro, masked nympho or strange woman in the dark’.49 His own recent poetry, by contrast, was combining a tough American assurance with the earth-grounded English eye of Hawk, without going into free form or confessional mode.
If there was a like-minded American poet, it certainly wasn’t someone in the tradition of ‘electronic noise’ coming out of the suicidal Hart Crane, whom Lowell in Life Studies called the Shelley of his age. Rather, it was the Southern agrarian John Crowe Ransom. Behind every word of Ransom’s poetry, Ted told Luke, repeating some of the Leavisite language of their Cambridge days, ‘is a whole human being, alert, sensitive, reacting precisely and finely to his observations’. As for British poetry, it needed to get back to this kind of wholeness, the tight weave of ‘the thick rope of human nature’, which had been found in the old ballads, in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Webster, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, the dialect poems of Burns, but virtually no one since. For a century and a half the English sensibility had got too hung up on ‘the stereotype English voice’ of the gentleman.50 What was needed was a distinctly ungentlemanly tone and matter, a new poetry of working-class roots and rural rootedness. This is what he was developing in his new book, which was nearing completion. The name of D. H. Lawrence is strikingly absent from the genealogy outlined here: perhaps out of a certain ‘anxiety of influence’, Ted is suppressing the name of the writer who came immediately before him as a northern, working-class voice with a sensitivity to the raw forces of nature, an interest in myth and archetype, an unashamed openness of sexual energy, and a distinctly lubricious attitude to the female body (Lawrence was the poet who compared the ‘wonderful moist conductivity’ of a fig to a woman’s genitals).51
Leonard Baskin agreed to consider doing a design for the cover of the new book. Ted gave him a lead by suggesting that the ‘general drift’ of the poems could be summed up as ‘Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel’.52 Ted proposed Baskin to Faber, but did not get the response he wanted; they went for a geometric dust-wrapper design instead. In a separate development, though, Faber did accept ‘a book of 8 poems for children’, each of which was about a relative: a sister who was really a crow, an aunt devoured by a thistle, and so on. It was published under the title Meet My Folks!
Ted jokingly told Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, that it was his own equivalent of Lowell’s Life Studies, which had included intense poems of family memory and marital discord with such titles as ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’, ‘Grandparents’ and ‘Man and Wife’. It would be a long time before Ted started publishing pieces about his family, let alone his marriage, in this ‘confessional’ voice.
Ted and Sylvia received a joint invitation to spend two months in the autumn at Yaddo, a rural retreat for writers in upstate New York. Though invited to apply, their proposals still had to be graded by the writers who were Yaddo’s assessors (Richard Eberhart, John Cheever and Morton Zabel). Both applications received a good mix of As and Bs.53 They were in.
They decided that, before taking up residence and then returning to England, they should set off to see America. They packed boxes for the journey, boxes in readiness for Yaddo and boxes for home. Ted wrote to his parents, telling them in great detail (complete with a little drawing) about the tent they had bought, discounted from $90 to $65. It had a sewn-in waterproof groundsheet, something unheard of in the camping days of his youth, and even a meshed window. Aurelia Plath bought them air mattresses that folded down to the size of pillowcases and thick puffy sleeping bags with zips all round (meaning that they could be joined together for cuddles on chilly nights in the wild). She threw in an assortment of other camping gadgets for good measure, and they had a trial night sleeping in the tent on the back lawn of her house in Elmwood Road, Wellesley. Ted pronounced it as comfortable a night as he had ever had. Any apprehensions that cleanliness-minded Sylvia would not be the camping type were swiftly dispelled. They said goodbye and off they went in Aurelia’s car, on a ten-week road trip through mountain, prairie and desert, all the way to California and back.
First they headed for the Great Lakes, crossing the Canadian border into Ontario. They took snapshots of each other by the tent and the waterside. In the Algonquin Provincial Park, Sylvia looked happier than she had ever looked, as a deer took blueberries from her hand. Then they went west to Wisconsin, where they camped by Lake Superior in the field of a kindly Polish fisherman near a village with the wonderful name of Cornucopia. His daughter took them fishing, but there wasn’t much in the way of catch, since lampreys had eaten nearly all the trout in the lake.
Then it was across the prairies, under big skies and through the Dakota Badlands. There were fierce electric storms, the earth was a sinister red. It was a place where seams of lignite ignited spontaneously, burning slowly for years or even centuries, turning the clay soil to brick shale. The land reeked of sulphur and tar. ‘This is evil,’ Ted remembered Sylvia saying. ‘This is real evil.’ There seemed to be some strange consonance between this America and the dark recesses of her mind. ‘Maybe it’s the earth,’ she said, or ‘Maybe it’s ourselves.’ The emptiness seemed to be sucking something out of them, the dark electricity within ‘Frightening
