Books: Poet's License

When a new book of poems makes front-page headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, chances are that the reason for such a hubbub lies somewhere outside the realm of aesthetic appreciation. That is certainly the case with Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $20). Although Hughes, 67, Britain's poet laureate since 1984, commands a wide and respectful audience among readers of serious contemporary poetry, the appearances of his books have not, until now, been stop-the-presses affairs. What makes Birthday Letters different is its subject matter: Hughes' poetic meditations on his marriage with Sylvia Plath.

It was 35 years ago this month that Plath, then 30, put her head into a gas oven and committed suicide. Hughes, her husband of a little more than six years, had left her and their two small children for another woman three months earlier. This domestic tragedy might have remained largely private had not Plath, already an established poet, left behind a powerful and searing sequence of poems, published posthumously as Ariel, that ensured her lasting fame. The nascent feminist movement in the '60s enlisted her as a martyr and vilified Hughes as her oppressor and, intentionally or not, murderer.

Hughes' silence about this matter over all the succeeding years puzzled some and infuriated others, particularly since he owned the rights to Plath's writings and admitted destroying and suppressing some of them out of concern for his children's feelings. While censoring some of his dead wife's words, had he nothing at all to say for himself?

Birthday Letters answers that question, but not in a way that is likely to satisfy those looking for gossip or breast-baring confessions. The 88 poems assembled here--all but two of them, The Pan and The Inscription, addressed to Plath as "you"--combine to form an often harrowing and poignant narrative in which the central characters are doomed to their fates before the story begins.

"What happens in the heart simply happens," Hughes writes at one point, a comment that can serve as an epigraph or epitaph for all the words surrounding it. For Hughes' account of his life with Plath rests on two complementary premises: she was destined to kill herself because of her preoccupation with her father, who died when she was eight; and Hughes was powerless to help her.

This argument is established early in Birthday Letters, when Hughes records meeting Plath, a Fulbright scholar, at Cambridge University in 1956: "I was being auditioned/ For the male lead in your drama." A tempestuous courtship soon gives way to an equally stormy marriage: two ambitious poets--one English and reserved, the other American and outwardly exuberant but secretly troubled--yoked together in an initial ecstasy that eventually subsides into mutual misery. Hughes, in his telling, learns that Plath has brought problems along with her "long, perfect, American legs." He becomes acquainted with her "homicidal/ Hooded stare," her "dybbuk fury" at his alleged failures as husband and father ("What had I done?").