Never at her best in bleak, blustery cold seasons, Sylvia groused about even good friends, like the Roches. Paul, an Englishman, was teaching at Smith, and his wife, Clarissa, befriended Sylvia, although their greatest period of intimacy would come later in Britain. Paul, Sylvia noted, had lost his Adonis-boy looks and was no poet—for all his connections to William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Ted held a similar critical view, describing his fellow countryman as “tall, thin a rapt shelleyan look, bright blue eyes that he holds wide open and slightly glazed, but withal utterly seedy … an old lady charmer, with his beautiful hushing voice, and wonderful English manners.” Clarissa seemed “naive and likeable” to Ted, but in Sylvia’s journal she appeared as a sullen blonde figure in a “silken pout” over a cup of coffee.

Sylvia and Ted also socialized with the poet W. S. Merwin and his British wife, Dido, then living in Boston. Bill Merwin embodied a cliché: the man’s man. Poet Grace Schulman remembered that Bill and Ted formed a sort of men’s club. Their utterly self-sufficient maleness seemed to impress her, inspiring a wonder at the masculine gravitational pull that Sylvia herself felt so strongly. At this early stage, though, the Merwins mainly represented to Sylvia the admirable urbanity of a couple on their own, in a high-rise apartment with windows so wide they reminded her of a ship deck.

Campus life bothered Sylvia because it subjected her to men like the poet Anthony Hecht, a notorious misogynist who plied her with patronizing pleasantries about her earnest, energetic manner. She was a grader for critic Newton Arvin’s lecture course, a job she enjoyed, which nevertheless made her feel like a drudge, dealing with assignments and students in a sort of mopping up operation. She would return home and give everything a thorough cleaning—and then bake a lemon meringue pie, taking immense satisfaction in her own realm. In a better mood, she described a party and her enjoyment of “blond witchy dear Clarissa” and a cherubic Paul, looking “Rossetti-like” with his blue eyes and blond curls. Department gossip amused her, especially tales of Alfred Fisher, who had married three of his students, and other tales about which faculty members had “the Power.” Sylvia preened when told how good her freshmen classes were. She exulted in a “dangerous enjoyment from shocking” her students, she wrote to Olwyn on 9 February, describing a memorable class that had stimulated “laughter & even tears, the occasion of the latter being a snowy Saturday spent evoking the bloody & cruel history of the Irish whiteboys, potato famines, mass hangings, etc.” Such interludes broke up the otherwise discontented winter that had Sylvia holding on with visions of June, dreaming of trading her Smith “girl-studded” past for the anonymity of Boston.

It was Ted’s turn in mid-March to be brought down with stomach upsets and fevers, as though he were putting himself in Sylvia’s place. They argued about his clothes and about Sylvia’s need to sew on buttons that went missing from his jackets. Reading the autobiography of a male friend, she objected to his notion that a man could eternally love a woman, even after he left her. She mused, “loving, leaving—a lovely consonance. I don’t see it: and my man doesn’t.” Or so she thought.

Plath sought inspiration in the work of Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, and De Chirico, and on 22 March, at the beginning of spring break, she reported to Aurelia that the poem-drought had ended. Work was beginning to shoot out like a geyser. She was also writing Dole Pineapple jingles for a contest. After all, they could use a car. Even just a few cash prizes would help. Commerce and art intermingled easily in the poems she enclosed for her mother’s perusal. In “Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer,” her whimsical work on Klee, she evokes a “little Odyssey” of battles in bathtubs such as children can create with extraordinary intensity. The child’s ability to fashion a fully functioning world separate from what Plath calls “meat-and-potato thoughts” in “Departure of the Ghost (After Paul Klee)” suggests how sorely she wanted to escape from the all-too-material world of her Smith routines.

By 28 March, Plath had produced eight new poems—her best ever, she thought, vowing not to waste “poem-time” on people she did not like. In a self-described arrogant mood, she pictured herself as the “Poetess of America” and Ted as the “Poet of England.” Ted, likewise, was touting himself to Olwyn, writing in late March about selling a poem to the “high-heeled” Mademoiselle, and extolling Sylvia’s recent productivity, the result of twelve-hour writing jags.

But a return to teaching brought out Sylvia’s complaints. Ted’s nose picking and scratching were getting on her nerves, even as she realized her petulance hardly made her an appealing companion. Right on schedule, she developed a cold and began her own irritating round of twitching and sneezing, only to be heartened by Ted’s comforting closeness and willingness to cook for her when she felt ill. Thank God she had a man who understood the demon in her. At Easter she filled Ted’s slippers with a chocolate rabbit and eggs, and he ate them all.

At a poetry reading arranged for Ted at Harvard by his friend Jack Sweeney, Sylvia was surrounded by the people who populated her journal: Mrs. Cantor, Gordon Lameyer, Marcia Brown, Phil McCurdy, Peter Davison, Aurelia, Olive Higgins Prouty—a veritable rollout of an audience she had made for herself and Ted. The group now also included Adrienne Rich, one of Plath’s chief rivals, cut down to size as “little, round & stumpy,” but also endowed with “vibrant short black hair” and “great sparking black eyes.” Sylvia had to admit that Rich seemed perfectly genuine, if opinionated. In the end, Sylvia felt distant from the company, as though the whole affair, like the novel she still could not command, was out of her control. She had the end-of-term blues, a syndrome familiar to seasoned academics, but a dreary period for a poet dead tired of reading scholarly studies of the writers she loved. It always seemed to surprise her when a class went well, since her mind was elsewhere, on what she would write when no longer shackled to the academic bench. She scoured her apartment in a fit of spring cleaning. During this period of furious tidying up, she noted in her journal a quarrel with Ted, who objected to her throwing out parts of his ratty old wardrobe. Later, she went out looking for him and spotted him on the street, staring at her with one of his killer looks.

By the spring of 1958, Ted, like Sylvia, found the whole academic enterprise enervating and apparently sometimes took his disaffection out on her. Eileen Ouelette remembered the time the couple attended one of the Lawrence House Wednesday night dinners. Sylvia sat at the head table with Ted, who belittled her throughout the evening, much to Eileen’s dismay. Then in her senior year, Eileen disliked this thin, tall Englishman. But Sylvia seemed very happy and very much in love, ignoring his disparaging commentary. Indeed, Sylvia wrote about him in her journal as the kind of man women looked for in romantic novels and when they scanned the pages of the Ladies Home Journal. When he was out, and they separated for as little as an hour, Sylvia wrote that she missed his heat and smell.

Like Hughes, Plath rejected any allegiance ancillary to her art. “The Disquieting Muses,” conceived as she was forsaking her teaching career, is an answer to the cautious mother who appears in Sylvia’s 11 May 1958 journal entry. A reserved Aurelia seemed not to rejoice when her daughter told her on Mother’s Day about the poems accepted for publication. Aurelia worried about the insolvency of poetry, but Sylvia remained stubbornly loyal to the muses that fostered her genius. She addressed her mother directly in the poem’s last lines, which renew Sylvia’s dedication to her troubling muses: “no frown of mine / Will betray the company I keep.” She seemed to take almost a perverse satisfaction when The New Yorker rejected the poem. In her journal, she comforted herself with the thought of Henry James, writing often without much of an audience, and with the wish to tell him about his posthumous reputation, a reward for all the suffering he had endured. She had no intention, however, of waiting to be discovered. “I am made, crudely, for success. Does failure whet my blade?”