Mad Poets

...I feel like a periwinkle
Left too high on the beach
By the tide...
What flood was it
That brought me here?

Eleanor Morris "Easter Sunday" ( Excerpted from Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam )

Anne Sexton was first hospitalized at the Westwood Lodge at the age of 28. She was the patient of Dr. Orne. She met a very talented and creative musician also a patient of the doctor. She found this fellow "very crazy" poet talked "language" or poetry just like her. She found that she was sort of reborn, and her place, her niche was with poets. Orne encouraged her, and lavished praise on her seminal work...so she kept on writing.

Now at the time, this was in the 50's, McLean was known as a place that mad writers would spend time at. So it sort of had a cache attached to it. And as Alex Beam points out in "Gracefully Insane" Sexton had the qualifications. She had two suicde attempts by age 30, extended stays at other local institutions. Her collection "To Bedlam and Back" speaks to her madness.

Sexton was very competitive. She knew that both Lowell and Plath were at McLean. She figured that a "residency" there would be a straw in her poetic hat. Like Plath she came from a tony suburb of Boston, and both had looks, charm, and were in all the right magazines. As Beam pointed out,in some way they knew that mental illness can inspire great poetry.

Beam points out that after Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University Sexton and Plath met over a number of drinks, and even discussed killing themselves. Sexton said of Plath: "She told the story of her first suicide in loving detail."

There may have been some jealousy on Sexton's part when she did away with herself. She wrote:

"Thief
how did you...crawl done alone,
into the death
I wanted so badly
and for so long..."


Lowell first checked into McLean when he was 41 years old in 1958. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet--at the top of his game. But he was plagued by mental illness. But Lowell was a florid manic depressive. As Beam points out:

"he would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life."

"Waking in the Blue" was in his famous collection "Life Studies." Being in the confessional mode, the family took strong objection to it. A few weeks after "Life Studies" was published Lowell was admitted to McLean. "Waking..." was full of references to the aristocracy he grew up in. "Mayflower Screwballs," "Thoroughbred Mental Cases"

Here is an account of Bowditch Hall from Beam's book




* Material taken from Alex Beam's "Gracefully Insane..."