Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Words Left Unspoken--Updated 6/1/00

This month’s column will be a bit of a departure from my typical literature reviews. Instead, I’d like to contemplate the literary relationship between Ted Hughes, Britain’s late Poet Laureate, and his American born wife Sylvia Plath. Both poets, or more accurately both poets' writings, have been in the news lately. When Hughes died from cancer in 1998, his literary estate permitted access to previously expurgated pages of Plath’s journals (available through the Amazon UK book site at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN... which were published this spring in the United Kingdom, and to over two tons of Hughes’ personal papers, which are housed at Emory University.

As many know, Hughes and Plath’s stormy marriage ended first in a separation and then permanently with Plath's suicide in 1963. Strong opinions prevail over who was to blame for the marriage’s demise. Hughes has been depicted as a philandering womanizer. Sylvia has been blamed as an insecure woman with an irrational temper.** The Hughes/Plath marriage linked two talented, volatile personalities who simultaneously competed with and complemented one another on the literary battle ground. Human relationships are too complex to attribute blame solely to one party or another. I think it’s fair to say, however, that their tempers, as well as their affections, colored each other’s work. When two people live and work in such close proximity, it’s inevitable that their efforts entertwine in conscious and subconscious manners. Although Plath’s letters and journal entries reveal how her husband influenced her writing by suggesting topics and themes, Hughes' personal papers reveal how the two poets habitually wrote on the reverse side of drafts of each other’s works. This discovery offers the potential to compare the poets’ drafts with their final versions to question and consider who influenced whom and to what extent.

Before his death, Hughes published Birthday Letters , a collection of poems that voice the reticent poet’s feelings about Plath and her haunting presence after her suicide. A number of the poems, with titles and imageries borrowed directly from Plath’s poems, suggest an eerie discourse (albeit one sided) between the two poets, as if the back to back drafts span the distance between this world and the next.

Sometimes, however, the words absent from the page reveal just as much, if not more, than the words on the page. The April 27th edition of The New York Review of Books contains a review of Hughes’ translation of Alcestis. The reviewer Daniel Mendelsohn notes that Alcestis is a “play that notoriously allows a flawed man to undo and redo the fatal past” (30), an interesting comment if one considers Birthday Letters to likewise be Hughes’ attempt to rewrite his past or to clear his conscious. According to the book review, Hughes’ translation ends with a “disturbing silence” (30), with words left unspoken. These silences often reverberate longer than the uttered word, as anyone who’s ever been victim of the “silent treatment” can attest. What words are left unspoken in Birthday Letters ?

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