An ancient Irish triad, runs: ‘Death to mock a poet/Death to be a poet/Death to love a poet.’ Such a bleak warning has peculiar resonance for Ted Hughes, given that the very public tragedies that attended his life would have overshadowed a lesser writer. But as a poet, Hughes was the real thing: both an unacknowledged legislator of the world (with his unfashionable – for the 1950s – primitivism and prescience with regard to environmental issues) and a legislator of the unacknowledged world with his vast and eccentric syncretism (best or worst displayed in his controversial re-imagining of Bardolatry in ‘Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being’).
The letters here represent a sprinkling of the poet’s vast archive; as a correspondent he appears to have been unfailingly generous both with his time and his erudition. Matching the breadth of his work, the range is vast, learned and frequently eccentric, but always riveting; there are some wonderful asides on the creative process.
The letters that will inevitably but unfairly draw the most attention are those dealing with his life with Sylvia Plath. After decades of being demonised as the archetypal Bad Husband (time was when Hughes could not read his own work in public without being heckled for ‘murdering’ Plath), the tender lyrical memoirs of ‘Birthday Letters’ (published in 1998 as he was dying of cancer) ushered in a rethinking of his worth. The letters here show Hughes’ fullest devotion to his craft and to the oracular function of the poet.
In a letter to Plath at the height of their passion Hughes wrote: ‘If you write whatever attracts you and you write it as hard as you can, and as rich, then you can’t miss.’ Few poets ever gave or followed better advice. Brilliant and fascinating.
