Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

In 1981 and 1982, introducing the Collected Poems and the journals, Hughes continues to insist upon the "truth" or authenticity of his definition of Plath, but in such a way as to remind the reader of the very provisionality he attempts to deny. "Her evolution as a poet went rapidly through successive moults of style, as she realized her true matter and voice.... At each move we made, she seemed to shed a style."(67) It seems problematic to assert that everything that came before the Ariel poems was merely a style, but that the last style was "true." If Plath was consistently "shedding" styles, it is surely logical to conclude that, had she lived, she would have shed the Ariel voice eventually and discovered another (perhaps "truer") voice. The "true" voice in the Collected Poems is, we are told, maternal: Plath finds "anxious mothering title[s] for the growing brood" of poems she was composing. Although in "Publishing Sylvia Plath," written ten years earlier, Hughes had cited the "importance" of some of Plath's poems as the reason to overlook their aggression, in the Introduction to The Collected Poems he states, pragmatically, that more of the "personally aggressive" poems might have been "omitted" from Ariel had they not already been published. That is, the hostility of the "personal" poems is not excused by their "importance," but must be endured because they had already been made public (by Plath, which is implicit but never stated). What Hughes calls the "personal," and I have been calling the "biographical," underlies each of these readings of Plath: the "true" voice, which is maternal, must not be admitted to be "personally aggressive," so that Plath's own drive to make public her poetic aggression (as well as the more maternal poetry) is abnegated.

There have been several readings of Hughes's Foreword to Plath's journals in 1982, rewritten as an article for Grand Street, but most of these readings have focused upon either Hughes's own narratival self-construction in the two articles, or upon his destruction of the late journals.(68) But in this article Hughes makes several other important assertions about Plath. He authorizes his denomination of Plath's "true" or "authentic" voice on the basis of his having married her, and then associates that voice with the female and the maternal:

There was something about her reminiscent of what one reads of

Islamic fanatic lovers of God--a craving to strip away everything from

some ultimate intensity, some communion with spirit, or with reality,

or simply with intensity itself. She showed something violent in this,

something very primitive, perhaps very female, a readiness, even a

need, to sacrifice everything to the new birth.... The negative phase

of it, logically, is suicide. But the positive phase (more familiar in

religious terms) is the death of the old false self in the birth of

the new real one. And this is what she finally did achieve, after a

long and painful labor.