We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the 'black marauder' who is the male poet-muse of her fantasies. Doubled and twinned - 'one skin between us', as she says; 'two feet of one body', as he says - they launch on the hard labour of poetic careers, supporting themselves on writing prizes and intermittent teaching jobs. She dreams that they will divide the kingdom of poetic fame; she will be 'The Poetess of America', as he will be 'The Poet of England and her dominions'. But the marriage frays. Tied down to their two babies, frustrated at the slowness of success, she discovers that he is having an affair, and they separate. In the following months, she writes the greatest and angriest poems of her life, perhaps the greatest of her generation: but they are rejected by literary editors as 'too extreme'. In the coldest winter of the century, at the age of 30, she commits suicide by gassing herself.

LRB 11 July 1991 | PDF Download