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its confessional candor was nudged by Robert Lowell. Perhaps Anne Sexton had contributed something of her own dark menstrual madness. Nor was the voice influenced by the hymnal rhythms of Emily Dickinson’s meditations on death and love. It was incomparable.
    The poems were hypnotic—as Robert Lowell, her sometime teacher, later said in his introduction to Ariel (which appeared in 1965 in England, 1966 in America). They were unapologetically female. An Amazon wrote them riding bareback. She had cut off one breast and dipped her quill in her blood. We would never know precisely why she killed herself. Nor could we ask.
    Why did she die? Who was responsible? How could she have left these driven, hurtling lines and, as we later learned, two helpless children? What did her husband, the rugged, seemingly heartless poet Ted Hughes, have to do with it? (Of course I never dared to ask him when we met.) He was her widower, executor, the father of Frieda and Nicholas (to whom her second book, when it appeared under the title Ariel, was dedicated).
    We like our poets better when they’re dead—especially our women poets. Sylvia knew this. She knew a lot about the suppression of women poets in the Age of Eliot and she was determined to overcome it—whatever the cost.
     
    After three decades of fearless female writing, it’s hard to credit how male-dominated the literary world was then. For my generation (which graduated from college in the midsixties, before they became “The Sixties”), poetry was a men’s club. Sylvia Plath definitively broke open the territory to women. She made it possible to strip the female mind naked in print.
    Anne Sexton had begun this journey with To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960. Sylvia Plath’s extraordinary voice took us further. These two poets embodied the first surge of the Second Wave. Not surprisingly, poetry, which comes blood-warm straight out of the unconscious, led the way.
    Of course I don’t mean to imply that there were no earlier women poets who broke ground. Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Ruth Stone, Muriel Rukeyser, Judith Wright, May Sarton, Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich had all published extraordinary poems. And Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Diane Wakoski, Joyce Carol Oates and others were beginning to appear in the sixties. But perhaps it was the flamboyance of Plath’s and Sexton’s suicides that thrust their work into the larger public consciousness. Poetry was so important you would die for it. And in those days you had to. The gentlemen’s club of poetry in the early sixties is well evoked by Carolyn Kizer’s “Pro Femina,” a poem I went back to again and again for courage:
    I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.
    Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman.
    And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters
    On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers . . .
    Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;
    Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists
    Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles
    With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas
    When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,
    The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail.
    Kizer perfectly analyzed the problem of a craft in which the practitioners were all suicides and spinsters, even if they were married (a problem I have with the myth of Woolf—who often seems to be worshipped for her sexless married spinsterhood).
    “From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women,” Kizer writes. “How unwomanly to discuss it!”
    ... we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:
    Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity.
    Kizer was our diagnostician, but Plath and Sexton provided the cure. No apologies. No analyses. No tea and sympathy. Instead, we heard a voice speaking straight from the female gut. Though death-bound,