(Mrs. Oscar Williams)—all little read today — reached anconsiderable public and surely inspired many an imitativensonnet penned by sensitive teenage girls in the hinterlandsn— Anne Sexton was one of them — whose only exposure tonserious poetry came through popular magazines and anthologiesnedited by those two poedc Barnums, Williams andnLouis Untermeyer. Read today, however, they seem decidedlynlace-curtain, the last inheritors of the genteel Victorianntraditions of Christina RossetH and Elizabeth BarrettnBrowning. Only MilJay still receives a grudging page or twonin most modernist anthologies.nHow much the role of the woman poet has changed, andnin such a short span of time, might best be demonstrated byna bit of personal experience. Some fifteen years ago Inparticipated in an informal group of six or seven poets thatnmet monthly in the living room of one of the members. Insuppose that the group did not differ much from hundredsnlike it; the members would distribute copies of their poems,nread them aloud, and then, between the passing of onion dipnand the pouring of wine, discuss their strengths andnweaknesses. The workshop-cum-group-therapy approach toneverything, from psychotherapy to poetry, has become ancommonplace in contemporary American .society, and it isnrare to encounter an adult who is not a past or presentnmember of some kind of support group.nThis group, however, was far from unsophisticated; onenmember was a retired professor of creative writing who hadnrecently produced a chapbook, and all of the other membersnhave gone on to publish either individual collecdons ofnpoetry or substantial numbers of poems in periodicals. Thengroup was also fairly well balanced by age, gender, andn(insofar as I can judge) sexual preference and contained atnleast one bona fide member of a minority group. I mendonnall this merely to underline the significance of an exchangenthat occurred at one of the meedngs, an incident that revealsnmuch about the directions that poetry by women has takennin recent years.nOne of the members had written a poem that containednin the dde the word “poetess,” apparently used withoutnirony. The other members made some comments on suchnmatters as line-breaks and punctuation, but no one, male ornfemale, mentioned “poetess” until I suggested to the authornthat he was likely to give offense in certain circles if he usednit, that, in fact, he would be lucky to escape alive. I held nonparticular case for or against the word per se — is “actress”nany worse? — and as far as I was concerned it summoned upnonly the faindy ridiculous specter of some pale young thingndressed in black declaiming breathless quatrains to thenmoon — the female equivalent of Ernie Kovacs’ “PercynDovetonsils.” On the other hand, several women academicsnof my acquaintance had recentiy made it clear that theynconsidered the term not only quaint but sexist as well. Mynfriend seemed genuinely surprised to be told this, and evennthe women in the group seemed to have no strong feelingsnon the subject, a reaction it is almost impossible to imaginentoday.nWhen, exactly, did women poets stop thinking ofnthemselves as poetesses? Or did they ever? Mynedition of the OED contains one citation that is anythingnbut pejorative: “Among the ancients Sappho . . . was calledn22/CHRONICLESnnn’the poetess,’ as Homer was called ‘the poet.'” Nevertheless,nmost of the examples in Webster’s Dictionary of EnglishnUsage mention its history of giving offense, with onencommentator noting its “suggestion of tepid and insipidnachievement” and another its connection with “femaleghettonpoetry.” hiterestingly, one of the last notable uses ofnthe word occurs in the Voices & Visions segment on SylvianPlath, when she speaks in an interview of Anne Sexton asn”the American poetess . . . who writes about her experiencenas a mother . . . who has had a nervous breakdown.”nAt other times, Plath mentioned her own desires to becomen”the Poetess of America,” which is perhaps to say that shenfelt herself to be in serious competition only with othernwomen poets, the most prominent of whom she referred tonas that “little, round and stumpy” Adrienne Cecile Rich.nSince Plath and Sexton are the twin cornerstones uponnwhich contemporary American women’s poetry has beennbuilt, we must gauge their reputations carefully. Measurednsolely by the effect of their careers on other writers and onnthe course of literary history, they must be ranked amongnthe most influential artists of the century. Yet theirs is anninfluence that rests more on the iconic significance of theirnlives than on the intrinsic value of the work they produced.nLess than thirty years after Plath’s suicide in 1963, fivenbook-length biographical works and an even greater numbernof critical studies have appeared. Sexton, who killed herselfnin 1974, has spawned a like amount of criticism, and DianenWood Middlebrook’s recent biography has produced asnmuch controversy as any similar recent study of a politiciannor celebrity in its reliance on material that has traditionallynbeen off limits to the biographer. In the popular mind, atnleast, Plath and Sexton are forever linked as the two mostnimportant female members of the so-called confessionalnschool of poetry.nSylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met in the spring of 1959nwhen they both participated in a creative writing seminarnrun by Robert Lowell at Boston University. On severalnoccasions they shared cocktails after class, where, as Sextonncharacteristically put it, they “would talk at length about ournfirst suicides.” Thereafter, they corresponded from time tontime, exchanging poems and news, and, after .Plath’s death.nSexton published a rather self-serving elegy addressed to hern(“Thiefl — / how did you crawl into, / crawl down alone /ninto the death I wanted so badly and for so long.”) in hernPulitzer Prize-winning collection of 1966, Live or Die. Butnbeyond this acquaintance, they shared few similarities eithernin their lives or in their poetry.nWhen they met, Plath, with degrees from Smith andnCambridge, was a driven perfectionist who had beennconsciously preparing herself for a literary career since herneady teens. Married to British poet Ted Hughes (now PoetnLaureate), she strove to excel in several roles — poet, wife,nmother-to-be — and, in many ways, seemed the embodimentnof the all-American overachiever, the grown-upnversion of the little gid who always has her homework.nSexton, on the other hand, was a middle-class housewifenwith a history of emotional problems who had recenflynbegun writing poetry on the advice of her psychiatrist.nLacking an adequate formal education, she was a poeticnautodidact whose talents did not find expression until shenhad two daughters and was nearing the end of her 20’s.n