It is strange to contemplate the destinies of America’s three most prominent women poets of the post-Bogan-Bishop generation: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. Two of them committed suicide; the third, Adrienne Rich, had a husband who did. Rich eventually turned into the most militant of lesbian feminists, refusing even to talk to men, except on business matters.
I met Plath only once. She was with Peter Davison, the editor-poet, her then lover; we were waiting to get into the Brattle Theater, just off Harvard Square. During a brief conversation, Miss Plath impressed me as rather plain under her defiantly blondined hair, but lively enough for a Smith girl, a part she looked to a “T.” Adrienne Cecile Rich, a Radcliffe undergraduate, signed up for a poetry course given by Archibald Macleish, in which I was her section man, though not for long. She complained to me, and doubtless also to Macleish, that the course wasn’t stimulating enough, and that, as winner of that year’s Yale Younger Poet award, she was not shown sufficient consideration. Soon she dropped the course. Some time later, after a poetry reading by Rich, a Radcliffe dean asked me for my opinion. I allowed as how, to appreciate it fully, one would have needed the combined attributes of Homer and Beethoven, namely blindness and deafness.
One of Anne Sexton’s symptoms was a preternatural need to be loved by everyone all the time.
