I Go Back to May 1937

Sharon Olds’s first book of poems, Satan Says, was published in 1980, when Olds was 37 years old. It was very successful and caused a bit of controversy with its candor about sexuality. Working in the confessional mode, Olds was immediately compared to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, poets who pushed literary boundaries in the 1960s. The emotional rawness and blunt language of her poems, both in that collection and subsequent ones—including 1987’s The Gold Cell in which “I Go Back to 1937” first appeared—made some critics uncomfortable. As Olds herself noted to poet Kaveh Akbar in a 2014 interview, there were people “who didn’t just not like my work but hated it and wrote me enraged rejection slips.” As she put it, what they really objected to was her writing about “sexual love and sexuality, and my drive to write about family in a way that was not very courteous.” Her concentration on the ugliness of the female experience, as well as the capacity for pleasure, caused a reaction in the literary world.

Tony Hoagland, the lauded American poet, wrote an extensive response to some of her critics’ misogynistic accusations in a 2009 article for The American Poetry Review called “The Unarrestable Development of Sharon Olds” (Hoagland’s article is linked in the Further Readings section below).