Boston, The Athens of America; Boston and its Poets

Just returned from Boston, only now fully conscious of the extent of the city's literary heritage and landmarks associated with Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, James, Longfellow...and Dickens.

This wasn't primarily a visit for tourism and sight-seeing.

Strange that I should have chosen to go to Lowell, Jack Kerouac's hometown, formerly an industrial cotton mill town, rather than explore in greater detail the Boston and Cambridge/Harvard of some of my favourite twentieth century American writers, poets Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, e.e.cummings, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot, or novelist John Updike.  One has to imagine the Boston of Eliot's "Prufrock" ('I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'; 'In the rooms the women come and go') and "Preludes", ie the first Prelude which was originally entitled "Prelude in Dorchester (Houses)" 

"The winter evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passage ways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days..."

Information about Dorchester (Boston), named after Dorchester, Dorset. Eliot's descriptions of urban landscapes are as much St. Louis as Boston and London.

It would be interesting to try to recreate or imagine a seminar from the 1959 creative writing course  (English 306) given by Robert Lowell at Boston University, which was attended/audited by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. See Peter Orr's British Council interview with Sylvia Plath, 30 October 1962, in which she mentions Lowell and Sexton.

Some hints in her journals:

February 25, 1959: "Lowell's class yesterday a great disappointment.: I said a few mealytmouthed things...Lowell good in his mildly feminine ineffectual fashion...The main thing is hearing the other student's poems and his reaction to mine. I need an outsider...."  (Journals, p. 471)

March 20, 1959: "Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell's class criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann Sexton," an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff" (Journals, p. 475).

Some lines by Lowell:

"Joy to idle through Boston" (Bright Day in Boston)

"I've come a third time
to live in your dour, luxurious Boston..." (To Mother)

"Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston." (For the Union Dead)

An e.e.cummings poem  ('the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls')

Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost's The Gift Outright :

"The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed."


And, from the early poem "Clear and Colder- Boston Common"


"As I went down through the common,
    It was bright with the light of day,
  For the wind and the rain had swept the leaves
   And the shadow of summer away...


As I went down through the common,
  Then felt I first delight
Of the city's thronging winter days
  And dazzling winter night..."




"What was  New England? It was the first little nation that bade fair to be an English-speaking nation on this continent. In the first hundred years it had pushed off from England (it had drawn off and been pushed off, both,) into almost a nation, with its capital at Boston...There was Boston. There was much beautiful architecture, art." (from Frost's address, 'What became of New England', 1937).




Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived at 9 Willow Street, Boston in 1958-1959.

"We have an enormous view- the Charles river, sailboats, reflected lights from MIT- the moving stream of car lights on Riverside Drive- the hotels & neons- red, blue, green, yellow, above the city- the John Hancock building, weather tower- flashing- rooftops, chimneypots, gables- even the tree tops of the common from the bedroom- a fine place, dark green & light blue" (The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, ed Karen V. Kukil, Faber & Faber, 2000; p. 417)

Bob Dylan poem (1964):

"Jim Jim
where is our party?
where is the party that's one
where all members 're held equal....
a Boston tea party dont mean the
same thing...as it did in the new-born
years before...
and I'm still on that road, Jim
I'm still sleepin' at nite by its side..
an I look t you, Jim
where is the party for those kind of feelings?"

(sleeve insert, The Times They Are a -Changin' LP)

And, from the song "Highlands":

I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I’m just really not sure...

"New England" really begins here, with John Smith's Description of New England.
For Eliot, Frost, Lowell and Plath, England itself became a kind of new New England.

Not, perhaps, for John Updike?

"My beloved land,
here I sit in London
   overlooking Regent's Park...
exiled by success of sorts...

But it is you,
   really you I think of:
     your nothing streetcorners
     your ugly eateries
     your dear barbarities
     and vacant lots...
Don't read your reviews,
     A*M*E*R*I*C*A:
you are the only land."

(from Minority Report, Seventy Poems)