Maxine Kumin

Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver

TO made many personal friendships with writers; Hannah Green , who was fifteen years younger, acted as her mentor. She developed a close friendship with the poet Anne Sexton , from the time that...

Maxine Kumin provided a foreword to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton.

In 1958 AS joined John Holmes 's poetry class at the Boston Center for Adult Education (also attended by Maxine Kumin and Ruth Soter ). In September 1958 she enrolled in Robert Lowell 's poetry...

AS made many friends among her fellow poets: Kumin , Soter , William DeWitt Snodgrass , Sylvia Plath (whose death affected her deeply), George Starbuck and James Wright (who were also her lovers), and Anthony Hecht

She continued for the rest of her life her highly successful poetry classes at Boston University . In September 1972 she was appointed a half-time full professor there, with a salary of $10,000 for a...

She had made a series of suicide attempts that year, thwarted by friends or by random strangers. She lunched with Maxine Kumin that day, in Kumin's words a wonderfully gay and silly lunch.

Shortly before this she had watched British critic I. A. Richards on tv explicating the form of the sonnet. She thought, Well, I could do that. She was soon revelling in Dr Orne 's approval...

AS collaborated with Maxine Kumin on four books forHoughton Mifflin children from Eggs of Things, 1963, to The Wizard's Tears, 1975.

AS wrote these thirty-nine poems in a period of twenty days, with two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital, in January 1973. At the end of each day...