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Letters of Ted Hughes

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

Christopher Reid
Faber, 800pp, £30,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Philip Hensher

It is hard to think of much of her art as possessing any interest in itself — it is all competent, tidy and quite dead. The authors, perhaps unfamiliar with the history of art, make excessive claims for what are really only artroom exercises, often not recognising specific models. The volume does her no favours, really; it draws attention to that part of her — a nagging presence in too much of her poetry, as well — which was satisfied to be graded A in undergraduate classes. I find it amazing that scholars find so little to use in Hughes’s comments about her, even in the explication of the different significance of the colours red and blue at the end of Birthday Letters. It is an omission only to be explained by an ongoing and irrational animosity towards Hughes in the Plathite community. The book is an interesting addition to our sense of Plath, but in the end a small one, and its authority is undermined in minor but telling ways — if you are going to praise Frida Kahlo, you ought to be able to spell her name.

Ted Hughes, on the other hand, was a man in touch with something that the rest of us can only dimly glimpse, and in his letters we see not only an account of that long connection, but moments of it as well. This is a book, like the letters of Keats, which will be read in 200 years’ time.

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