Anne Sexton met Sylvia Plath at one of Robert Lowell’s famed writing workshops at Boston University. Below, Sexton writes to Charles Newman, the editor of Tri-Quarterly, about issue 7, to be published in the fall of 1966. The issue was dedicated primarily to Sylvia Plath, including fifteen of her poems, several essays on her work, and “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing,” a brief portrait written by Sexton. Lois Ames, the biographer referred to in the letter, did not publish a biography on Sylvia Plath but did edit the collection of Anne Sexton’s letters from which this letter was drawn.
14 Black Oak Road
circa autumn 1965
Dear Mr. Newman:
Please excuse the paper, but I have run out of my proper letterhead. And please know that I meant to answer your letter more promptly but that I was busy reading your issue of Tri-Quarterly on Yeats and also, having just returned from a reading tour, busy on my own poems.
I am very pleased to hear that you are going to put together a Spring issue with a feature section devoted to Sylvia Plath. I have already taken to chance that you wouldn’t mind it and sent this information along to a girl from Chicago who I met this summer and who is hoping and working on a book about Sylvia’s life and work. This girl, Lois Ames, might be able to add something—as she has started a bit of research. I did not know her before, but as she started her work she contacted me. I liked her and think she well may make it.
As for me. Oh hell! I have no length or major emphasis to add. One might quickly say that I have no contribution to make…However, I assume that you have seen the poem, the elegy, I wrote for Sylvia in Poetry. I sent it to an American magazine because I felt as you do—that no one had noticed over here. I hope that you have read and perhaps might reprint articles about her from Britain, by Alvarez, or those in The Critical Quarterly. If you do not know these please let me know. For they are important!!!!!!!
I am writing late at night and my typing is more than poor.
I could add, for Sylvia, only a small sketch, such as my poem. I knew her for a while in Boston. We did grow up in the same small town, Wellesley, but she was about four years behind me and we never met. We didn’t meet until she was married and living with Ted Hughes in Boston. Then she heard, and George Starbuck heard, that I was going to a class at B.U. run by Robert Lowell. Then they both joined me…we orbited around the class silently and then, after each class, we would pile into my old Ford and I would drive quickly thro the traffic to, or near the Ritz. I would always park at a LOADING ZONE sign and tell them “It’s okay, because we are going to get loaded” and off we’d pile into the Ritz to drink 3 or 4 or 2 martinis…often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides, at length, in detail, in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. Ignoring Lowell and the poems left behind. After this we would all three weave out of the Ritz to spend our last pennies at the Waldorf Cafeteria—a dinner for 70 cents […] Sylvia’s Ted was able to wait or did not care and I had to stay in the city (I live outside of it) for a 7 p.m. appointment with [Dr. Martin]. A funny three. I have heard since that Sylvia was determined to make it—to be great. At the time I didn’t really notice. I was too determined myself. Lowell said, then and later, “I like her work. She goes right to the point.” I didn’t agree. I thought she dogged the point with her form and with her difficult and far-flung images. I felt she was not really making her own form or her own point. I knew she was skilled. Intense, perceptive—strange, blonde, lovely Sylvia…from England to America we exchanged a few letters. I have them now of course. She mentions my poems and I sent her new ones as I wrote—I’m not sure. The time of the loading-zone was gone and now we sent aerograms back and forth now and then. George was in Rome. He never wrote. He divorced and remarried over there. Sylvia wrote of one child, keeping bees, another child, my poems—and then in her own silence, died.
I could explain and better write such a small sketch if it will suit you. I can further say that I believe her later poems, her second book, is her really great stuff. I can add that I never guessed that she had it all in her. We were just two bar flies—talking of death—not of creation. What she did in her last poems, is I feel, worth a whole lifetime.
I know this is all mistyped and misspelled, but here you have it. Is this what you want?
I am greatly impressed by the Tri-Quarterly and thank you, more than you could know, for sending me that issue.
Please let me know if you want my Bar Fly sketch expanded…and if you would or could use any advice. I want to help. I am ashamed of America—when I think of Sylvia’s last poems. I read at many universities and yet no one mentions her work. Are they all fools? You are not, at any rate.
With best wishes,
From Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Mariner Books, 2004.
FURTHER READING
Learn more about the friendship of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath in an archival article from The American Poetry Review.
At the Guardian, read Al Alvarez, referenced above due to the essays he had written about Plath’s work, discussing his role as Plath’s mentor and as one of the early champions of her work.
Learn more about Plath and Sexton’s time working with Robert Lowell at Boston University.