Being Sylvia Being Ted Being Dylan: Plath's "The Snowman on the Moor"

A Smith College freshman in the year of Dylan Thomas's first American tour, Sylvia Plath lived most of her adult life within the ambit of 1950s Dylanolatry. Some details of the connection are uncertain. Although they shared the same birthday (October 27), and although as a follower of astrology Plath cared about such matters,¹ there seems to be no sign that she knew of the coincidence. They were sometimes in the same neighborhood, but although a college boyfriend remembers her as having attended a Thomas reading, she left no published record of the event and, apparently, no unpublished one either, and it seems strange that someone as sensitive to physical impressions as she was would have failed to remark so distinctive a specimen as Thomas.² Still, whether or not they were ever in the same room, there is ample evidence that for most of her poetic development she was under his spell. Edith Milton, a student at Mount Holyoke College in the years when Plath was at nearby Smith, remembers him, in her account of a reading he gave on her campus, as being exactly the embodiment of those dark primal forces which the Eliotic myth-criticism popular in the English Departments of the time had taught Plath's generation to prize:

I was introduced to Dionysus during my first year at Mount Holyoke—twice, in fact. The first introduction came by way of The Golden Bough, which we all read avidly in Freshman English. We had an almost physical need for blood and beastliness in those days, like teenage vampires dismayed by an unmentionable addiction. It was a thirst which these legends of the wine-god seemed to assuage. In the course of that spring semester we untangled with relish the story of his death and rebirth—his slaughter and dismemberment, the scattering of the various parts of his mutilated corpse over fields and orchards to ensure the season's fruitfulness. We groped our way along this tale, as if it were Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of our spiritual confusion and sexual ignorance.³

(Milton's second Dionysiac meeting, she will go on to say, was with Thomas himself.) Plath had encountered The Golden Bough too,⁴ probably as part of her Wasteland homework, and like Edith Milton and her fellow classmates had little doubt as to which poet in the present age qualified as Dionysius. In high school, she had "imitated and idolized" Thomas "as the perfect example of the modern poet, excessive in language and life";⁵ in college, she wrote a paper on him,⁶ won honorable mention in a writing contest named for him,⁷ and, at least in The Bell Jar version of events, spent most of her free time reading him⁸ —she "loved Dylan Thomas ... almost more than life itself"⁹ ; thereafter, she would continue to share her Thomas records and books with new-found intimates. The attachment could feed less genial impulses, too. Paul Alexander recounts what came to be called "The Dylan Thomas episode" during her summer internship at Mademoiselle. The magazine was to be the publisher of Under Milkwood, and Plath seems to have been given some editorial duties with the manuscript. By bad luck, she was away when Thomas showed up for a conference. Alexander tells what followed:

When Sylvia found out, she fumed. For the next two days, she became obsessed with Thomas. She hung out in his favorite tavern and lurked in the hall by his hotel-room door. She never saw him, and eventually she gave up, but her distress seemed grossly exaggerated.¹⁰

It was not the only such incident. Once, in college, "her rage knew no bounds" when her suitcase was stolen from her date's car, mainly because it contained her "underlined copies of Dylan Thomas and Dostoevsky."¹¹ Later, a knock-down-drag-out argument with her long-time boyfriend over whether Thomas's death had been the fault of his American sponsor effectively put an end to their engagement.¹²

Although over time...