Breaking with the Poetry World’s Orthodoxy

On January 10, 1963, one month before she took her life, Sylvia Plath recorded her last session with the BBC in London amid snowy, frigid weather that brought the city to a standstill. She reviewed Contemporary American Poetry, an anthology edited by Donald Hall that showcased works from writers as varied as Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and Denise Levertov—the collection included only seven women—and concluded with a shout-out to Galway Kinnell. Plath had underlined and starred sections throughout her Penguin paperback edition, now archived at the University of North Carolina, but nothing specific was noted about Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses.” (In mood and technique, Louis Simpson’s and James Merrill’s contributions seem closer to Ariel.) And yet she’d read Snyder’s poem while in her final blazing throes, and I sense a kind of handshake as the Beats and the Confessionals—or Beat-adjacent and Confessional-adjacent, as is the case here—wrangled the challenges of a postwar poetics.