Clemency Suggests

Books

Letters of Ted Hughes – ed. Christopher Reid/Faber

Finally! Moving, passionate, angry, funny, striking, brilliant and beautiful beyond belief, the collected letters of one of our greatest poets have now taken pride of place on my bedside table, and may, I suspect, be a permanent addition to the pile. They are extraordinary. For too long Hughes – who is also revealed here as an impassioned pioneer of the environmentalist movement – has suffered under the prying, accusatory eyes of those who would blame him for the successive suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill; a prime example of what happens when biographical speculation gets in the way of objective appreciation of artistic genius. Not that this collection, magnificently edited by Christopher Reid, shies away from that tragic period of Hughes’ life. ‘I was the only person who could have helped her’, he writes bleakly, of Plath, to his sister, ‘and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it.’