Life wasn’t all bad. There was fresh fish. Luke Myers came through on a short visit, and they reminisced about Cambridge days. Ted and Sylvia were both getting poems accepted. Ted heard that he had won the Guinness Poetry Award (£300) for ‘The Thought-Fox’. He received a treasured letter of congratulations from T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. The grand old man said how impressed he had been when he first read the typescript of the book and how delighted he was to have Ted on the Faber list.42 And in Boston there was the proper literary scene that they craved: a reading by Truman Capote, dinner-parties with Robert Lowell, intense discussions about poetry at the apartment of poet Stanley Kunitz (Ted did most of the talking, Sylvia sitting quietly with a cup of tea), a meeting with the now old and rather deaf but still legendary Robert Frost. Ted loved hearing stories about one of his favourite poets, the very English Edward Thomas, who had been inspired by Frost to turn from prose to verse only a couple of years before his death on the Western Front.
Sylvia sat in on Lowell’s poetry classes at Boston University, and he read both her work and Ted’s. Lying on the bed in the Elm Street apartment earlier in the year, Ted had written a poem called ‘Pike’. Lowell said it was a masterpiece.43 Leonard Baskin admired it too, and reproduced 150 copies of it privately under his personal imprint, the Gehenna Press. This was Ted’s first ‘broadside’. The title was in red, the poem in black, and there was an illustrative woodcut by an artist friend of Baskin’s, portraying two pike, one in black and the other in green. ‘Pike’ also appeared in a group of five immensely powerful Hughes poems in the summer 1959 issue of a magazine called Audience: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts. The four others were ‘Nicholas Ferrer’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘The Voyage’. A couple of months earlier, another magazine had published ‘Roosting Hawk’, which he had written sitting at his work-table one morning in Willow Street. He told his parents that he was finding that the key to a creative day was an early night and an early start. He was hitting his stride and would soon have enough good poems for a second collection. He was also starting work on a play. They went to tea with Peter Davison in his apartment across the Charles River in Cambridge. He gave Ted a copy of Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which chimed perfectly with the ideas he was exploring. ‘The Jung is splendid,’ he told Davison in his thank-you letter, ‘one of the basic notions of my play.’44
In January 1959 they acquired a tiger-striped kitten and called it Sappho. She was said to be a granddaughter of Thomas Mann’s cat, a suitably literary pedigree. In April, Ted won a $5,000 award from the Guggenheim Foundation, in no small measure due to the support of Eliot. He wrote to thank him, signing off the letter with a dry allusion to the famous opening line of The Waste Land: ‘I hope you are well, and enjoying April.’45
While living in the cramped Willow Street apartment, they were visited by Rollie McKenna, a diminutive Texan portrait photographer who was a genius with a Leica III camera fitted with a Japanese Nikkor screw lens of the kind used by Life magazine photographers in the Korean War. She had immortalised Dylan Thomas in two images, one with pout and cigarette, the other ‘bound, Prometheus-like, in vine-tendrils (his idea), against the white wall of her house in America’.46 Now she would capture Ted and Sylvia in images that would be published 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.