Heir to the peculiar New England strain of daemonic Coleridgian Romanticism typified by Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (see Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae) and extending in a debased form to such authors as Shirley Jackson (whose classic 1948 New Yorker story The Lottery I suspect was a minor influence on this poem) and Stephen King, Plath pays witty homage to Hawthorne throughout the poem: