Keys to the Poet’s Mythologies

This has been a significant time for anniversaries of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: 27 October 2012 saw the eightieth anniversary of Plath’s birth, while 11 February 2013 was the fiftieth anniversary of her death. Several important biographical books coincided with these anniversaries: Ted Hughes’s brother Gerald published Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir in 2012, while Ted Hughes: The Inner Life, a major biography by Jonathan Bate, is due in 2013. One of the new publications that adds to this corpus of biographical material is Keith Sagar’s latest book, Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar. Sagar is one of the earliest and most enthusiastic champions of Hughes’s writing. He has produced an impressive corpus of work, mainly on Hughes and D. H. Lawrence, during the course of his prolific career. Sagar’s major publications on Hughes include The Art of Ted Hughes (1975), the essay collection The Achievement of Ted Hughes (1983), Ted Hughes: A Bibliography (1983), which won the Library Association’s Besterman Award, and The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (2000).

Sagar spent much of his career as Reader in Literature at Manchester University, working for the extra-mural department. His position as an academic outside the main university department perhaps contributes to his perspective on literary studies, which remains loyal to Hughes’s works and to the author’s own views. He offers valuable bibliographical and biographical insights, and does not engage with literary theory. Sagar reprints his own review of Hughes’s 1994 volume of criticism Winter Pollen in the appendices to Poet and Critic. In this review, he states that ‘The theorists, having demonstrated to their own satisfaction that there is no such thing as imagination or meaning or Nature, have withdrawn from the real world (there being no such thing) into their self-chosen Purgatory where they walk in a ring, eyes fixed on the feet of the one in front’ (p. 314). Although Sagar banishes literary theoreticians to a Beckettian Purgatory of endless introspection, even the most theoretically minded readers of Hughes’s work will find Sagar’s latest book an eminently useful resource. It is also an engaging book because of Hughes’s versatile writing style, which is by turns analytical, candid, and humorous. There is much to enjoy in this volume.

Letters that have hitherto only been accessible in the British Library are published in this volume, which contains correspondence from 1969 to 1998, the year of Hughes’s death. Some have already been published in Hughes’s Selected Letters (Faber & Faber, 2007), edited by Christopher Reid. Poet and Critic publishes for the first time some highly significant letters that answer great puzzles in the lives of Hughes and Plath: for example, why would Sylvia Plath kill herself in the spring of 1963, when she was writing prolifically, had two young children to look after, and when Hughes was hoping that the two of them would be reconciled? Hughes’s answer to this is that a key contributory factor to Plath’s suicide may have been an anti-depressant to which she had an adverse reaction. He relates to Sagar, in a letter of 23 May 1981:

her doctor prescribed, for pep up, a drug that her U. S. doctors knew – but her English doctor didn’t – induced cyclical suicidal depression in her. She was allergic to it. Probably she didn’t recognise the trade name. She was aware of its effects, which lasted about 3 hours between the old pill wearing off, & the new one taking effect. Just time enough.

(p. 109)

Hughes’s great respect for Plath’s talent also comes across in this letter, in which he states that he wishes to ‘qualify your [Sagar’s] attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry – leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she...