In suburban Massachusetts, on 240 acres of peaceful grounds, is a literary legend—of sorts. McLean Hospital, with its long history of treating the blue bloods of Boston, has become an unlikely poetry landmark after providing both recuperation and inspiration to Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.
Plath was the first of the three to stay at McLean. In 1953, during a summer at home before her senior year in college, Plath swallowed a bottle of pills and crawled beneath her house. Her failed suicide attempt led to months of treatment at McLean and began her long relationship with the psychiatrist Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse. While there, Plath received insulin-shock therapy, anti-psychotic drugs, and ultimately electroshock therapy. The experience surfaced years later in her poem, "The Hanging Man," which begins, "By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me / I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet."
Lowell was admitted to McLean in 1958, though his infamous manic outbursts had already resulted in numerous stays at other mental institutions. Over eight years, he stayed there four times, correspondeding frequently from his hospital address, and sending letters to Theodore Roethke, Ezra Pound even Jackie Kennedy. Written about his first stay at McLean, his poem "Waking in the Blue" mentions Bowditch Hall and was pasted on the wall of the nurse's station there for years. It ends with the lines:
"I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jerseybefore the metal shaving mirrors,and see the shaky future grow familiarin the pinched, indigenous facesof these thoroughbred mental cases,twice my age and half my weight.We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor."