It's conventional to cite Lowell's direct influence on Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, both of whom were his students in the poetry writing class he mentions at the start of "Memories of West Street." Lowell's name is almost as large as theirs on the covers of their books. But I'm not sure that's fair to both women. As I know, teachers often learn a lot from their students. It may be that both SP & AS's names should be on the cover of Life Studies.

I began with a confession of my own. One of the things I've learned most clearly from trying for the last three years to end the course with SP & AS is my own limits as a reader and critic. I know for a lot of contemporary readers Sexton and (especially) Plath have a kind of mythic status -- the powerful dark emotions expressed in their poems and the fact that both committed suicide makes their lives and work seem somehow exemplary of our time, with its severely diminished expectations. For such readers, I think, part of the power of these poems must be the sense that they can only express, they can't exorcise or transcend, the anguish that is their emotional occasion. Realizing how uncomfortable I am with their work made me realize that one reason I've spent my life with literature -- i.e. at that one aesthetic remove from life -- is that I count on art, and the way it displays the capacities of the human imagination, the creative will, to represent a kind of defense against the utter pain that life can inflict. I tried to explain why, to me, Plath's poems keep evoking the idea of transcendence -- killing "Daddy" and being done with way he haunts & oppresses her, dying & being born again in "Lady Lazarus," the idea of ascension in "Fever 103" -- precisely to wind up demonstrating the poems', her own, refusal or inability to transform the emotions into anything but themselves. The last line of "Daddy," for example, is "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" -- "through" sounds like the poem has gotten somewhere, but it rhymes with "you," the word/rhyme that continually oppresses the poem, by being there at the end of so many lines. There is an "I'm" in that last line too, but it seems very small compared to the room that "Daddy, daddy, you bastard" still takes up. Similarly, when "Lady Lazarus" rises up from the ashes at the end of that poem, nothing has been consumed by the fire -- all the rage she felt at the start is still there. And while "Fever" offers the overt idea of transcendence, the title makes it clear we're dealing with delirium brought on by a sick body, not the spiritual healing of the soul or mind.

Having confessed my inability to do justice to the power that SP & AS have for so many readers -- and you could make a case for Ariel, the posthumous volume of Plath's poems, as the "most important volume of American poems since WW II"; at least, a lot of people own it who own little or no other contemporary poetry -- I asked the class as a group for help. There were some really good responses, from people who didn't like Plath (objecting, for example, to her appropriation of the Holocaust in so much of her imagery as the equivalent to her own emotionally devastated life) to people who obviously liked her a lot (and who saw, for example, in the amount of art that is in the poems a kind of transcendence of the brute emotions they express). We also talked a bit about why suicide seems somehow to confer cultural status on exemplary figures like Plath, Sexton, other confessional poets like John Berryman, Kurt Cobain, etc. I confessed I was feeling nostalgic for Longfellow's Village Blacksmith, the first figure we met in a poem this semester. He has suffered losses too -- but keeps at it: "something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose." I hope we'll all keep at it, but I can now say "I'm done" with all these lecture notes -- which means I've earned this night's repose! See you at the exam Monday.