Introduction

Abstract

Halfway through the twentieth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that the poet is a poem became gospel. Here is an example. In 1998, with flurry and fanfare, the English poet Ted Hughes published a collection of poems called Birthday Letters. These poems marked the first time that Hughes spoke publicly about his long-fabled and mythologized marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath. Plath married Hughes in 1956, but, at the time of her suicide seven years later, the two poets had separated; Hughes was living with another woman. When Plath died, she became a feminist symbol, a figure of a woman driven to despair by an uncaring husband. Hughes’s long silence on the subject of his life with Plath ended with the publication of Birthday Letters that was excitedly described as a response to, and literary dialogue with, Plath’s Ariel. Indeed, many of Hughes’s poems were written on the back of Plath’s manuscripts, giving rise to charges that Hughes was erasing and rewriting Plath.

The more I struggled, to be plain, the more Mannerism hobbled me.

—James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim