When two poets collide

This week came some news that has further fuelled the seemingly endless fascination with the tempestuous marriage between the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
PLATHS'S GIFT: Poet Sylvia Plath, whose work as been somewhat overshadowed by her depression and suicide.PLATHS'S GIFT: Poet Sylvia Plath, whose work as been somewhat overshadowed by her depression and suicide.
PLATHS'S GIFT: Poet Sylvia Plath, whose work as been somewhat overshadowed by her depression and suicide.

It was reported that hitherto unseen letters from Plath to her analyst and friend Dr Ruth Barnhouse had come to light after being put up for sale by an antiquarian bookseller in the US as part of an archive collection.

Written by Plath between early 1960 and shortly before her death in February 1963, the correspondence covers a period about which relatively little documentary material remains and shed light in particular on the extent of the estrangement at that time between Plath and her Yorkshire-born poet husband after the discovery of his affair with Assia Wevill. However, scholars will have to wait a while to have sight of the collection as Smith College, where Plath was a student in the early 1950s, has claimed that it forms part of the Barnhouse estate, bequeathed to it after the doctor’s death.

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The reputations of both Plath and Hughes have been affected in some way by the focus on their troubled relationship. Sadly, Plath’s gifts as a poet have been somewhat overshadowed by her depression and suicide. And her extraordinarily powerful and personal poetry, particularly her visceral final collection Ariel, written in the months leading up to her death, is often considered through the filter of what it is assumed was happening in her life, principally in relation to Hughes, at the time.

There is something within us as human beings that wants to create a narrative and make those connections between life and art – even when there may not be any. Of course, all writers take elements of their own experiences to feed in to their work, but they are magpies and are pretty indiscriminate about what they use as inspiration. It could just as easily be an overheard conversation on a bus or a tiny news cutting as something that has actually happened to them. The skill is in the way in which the writer then creatively turns that inspiration into a novel, play, poem or song that speaks to many other people.

I remember a few years ago at a literature festival event an author expressing his surprise at how frequently he was asked about how the plots of his novels related to events in his own life. His response, he said, was to always reply that he “made it up, because that is what writers do.”

Maybe it’s time – 55 years after her death and nearly 20 years after his – to finally let the Plath and Hughes story rest in peace.

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