This chapter discusses the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.

Spending equal time with Hughes’s poetry, especially Birthday Letters, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, this chapter examines how the Christological ideas at work in so much of Hughes’s other poetry applies to the life, literary output and tragic death of his first wife. We watch as the Edenic template of the fall repeats in Hughes’s depictions of Plath. Close attention is also paid to Plath’s “Pursuit,” with additional contributions from Yeats and Stevens, setting up a pattern of continual intertextuality. Plath’s foundering efforts to manage and restore her unfallen, divine self produce a range of fascinating effects in both her writing and Hughes’s. These particularly center on a body of landscape poetry written during the couple’s two-year stay in America, and reference is made to the work of artists Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The most explicitly Christological of Hughes’s Birthday Letters poems are discussed, and the argument made that his efforts to understand what happened to Plath in terms of a “symbolic death and rebirth” send him continually, though never with total satisfaction, to the Christian template.