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). He objected to the critics who called Olds “prurient” and “low brow” for discussing the body. He dismissed claims that her poems were self-indulgent for focusing too much on the minutiae of her domestic life. Hoagland’s response was that Olds’s poems contained “complex recognitions: an exploration of memory, complicity, empathy, and power.” In the end, Hoagland suggests, the quality of her work would win out, with her poems being seen as “skilled dramatic expressions of the most archetypal templates, obstructions and liberations of one human life.”

As evidenced by Olds’s enduring popularity amongst readers, the public does not appear to care about what the critics say about Olds’s subject matter; she continues to be widely read and to fill auditoriums for readings. In 2013, her winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Stag’s Leap did quiet some of the most virulent critics of her work. As Kaveh Akbar explains in his interview at Divedapper, Olds has become “one of the major figures of the canon” who guides “the way that poems about family are written” (A link to Akbar’s interview with Olds is in the Further Readings section below).