Both Plath and Sexton were of NewnEngland stock, and both showed earlynpromise. Plath published her first collection,nThe Colossus, in I960. Three othersna shattered mirror of suffering womankind.nwere published posthumously. Sexton’snfirst book, To Bedlam and Back, also appearednin I960; she published five more.nPlath was a Phi Beta Kappa, a Fulbrightnscholar, and a teacher at Smith; Sextonnwas a Robert Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf, anfellow of the American Academy of Artsnand Letters and the Royal Society fornLiteramre, a nominee for the NationalnBook Award in 1963, and winner of thenPulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Theynwere also friends and fellow students ofnRobert Lowell at Boston University.nEach is capable of evoking rare andnvaluable insights, and each has producednpoetry that will stand with some of thenbest of the last quarter-century. Inn”Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” for example,nPlath shows how a simple birdncan speak to the human spirit:nI only know that a rooknOrdering its black feathers cannso shinenAs to seize my senses, haulnMy eyelids up, and grantnA brief respite from fearnOf total neutrality.nOr in “Hardcasde Crags” she can distillnthe loneHness and isolation of an oldnwoman:nFlindike, her feet strucknSuch a racket of echoes from the steelynstreetnTacking in moon-blued aooks fromnthe blacknStone-built town, that she heard thenquick air ignitenIts tinder and shakenA firework of echoes from wallnTo wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.nDozens of other poems, both early andnlate, show the same command of formnand content.n24inChronicles of CultttrenBut as the years hastened on, an anguishednand confessional tone emergednand deepened into what one critic callsn”the holy scream, a splendid agony—n-Americanbeyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond allnbut art.” The often-anthologized “Daddy”nof 1962 is symptomatic in its frighteningnattack upon basic human relationshipsnand its revelation of her own dyingnspirit:nI could never talk to you.nThe tongue stuck in my jaw.nDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I’mnthrough.n”Paralytic,” written about two weeksnbefore her suicide, foreshadows the end:nLet me relapsenWhile the day outside glides by likenticker tape.nDead egg, 1 lienWholenOn a whole world I cannot touch.n”The Edge” is her last poem, composednabout a week before she yielded to thendark impulse:nThe woman is perfected.nHer deadnBody wears the smile ofnaccomplishment.nThe illusion of a Greek necessitynFlows in the scroll of her toga.nThus she finds her fialfillment only inndeath, a moment anticipated a few yearsnearlier in her journal: “I cannot ignorenthis murderous self; it is there. I smell itnand feel it, but I will not give it my name.n… I have this demon who wants me tonmn away screaming if I am going to benflawed, fallible.”nOexton, on the other hand, seems tonhave known littie happiness. Taking upnpoetry at age 28—at the suggestion ofnnnher psychiatrist—she tried to exorcise hernpersonal devils in poetry that typicallyndeals with abortion, adultery, dmgs, sexualnfrustration, incest, masturbation,nmenstruation, and suicide. Probably nonother well-known poet has dwelt so pcrsistendynon disturbing aspects of humannexperience with such manic detail. Mostnreaders are understandably uneasy withnsuch poems as “The Abortion,” “InnCelebration of My Uterus,” “ThenBreast,” “Menstruation at Forty,” andn”The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,”nall of them, as their present editor describesnthem, “a fever chart for a badncase of melancholy.” For Sexton, as shenwrites in “Noon Walk on the AsylumnLawn,”nThe world is fiiU of enemies.nThere is no safe place.nMost of her poetry, then, proves hernthesis that “poetry should be a shock tonthe senses.”nNot all of her work is in this sensationalnand confessional mode. Occasionallynshe rose above the psychotically personal,nas in “The Farm Wife,” inwhichanwoman, now married for a decade, desperatelynhopes thatnthere must be more to livingnthan this brief bright bridgenof the raucous bed.nIn one of her very best, “The Truth thenDead Know,” written shordy after thendeaths of her parents, she wrote movinglynon the grief and love experienced whennone is “tired of being brave.” After thenfuneral, a trip to the seashore gives her ansense of renewal:nwhere the sun gutters from the sky,nwhere the sea swings in like an ironngatenand we touch.nBut the deadnlie without shoesnin their stone boats.nThey are more like stonenThan the sea would be if it stopped.n