Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I recommend the experience. The two are so utterly brilliant, and so different, that imbibing their work together delivers a kind of psychic blow, breaking open a tectonic fault in the soul in the shape of the rupture that must have attended their harrowing romance. He, the manly midland mystic with his animist longings and strange bloodstained verse; she, the sturdy Cape Cod rhapsodist with her alluring shouts of aesthetic terror. What a thing it is when geniuses collide.
Read Full Article »
