FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Rare interview together from 1961
03.24.2014
10:21 am
Topics:
Tags:

htalpsehguh11.jpg
 
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes discuss their work and life together in this interview for the BBC radio program Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership, from January 18th, 1961. The interviewer is Owen Leeming, who asked about their first meeting at a party in February 1956:

Plath: I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I’d read some of Ted’s poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that’s actually where we met… Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later… We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.

Hughes: The poems haven’t really survived, the marriage, it took a hold. [Laughs]

Plath spotted her “big, dark, hunky boy” across a crowded room, and later danced, drank, and discussed poetry before Hughes kissed her “bang smash on the mouth.” Plath then bit him “long and hard” on the cheek, which he wore as a badge over the following weeks. Four months later, Plath and Hughes married on June 16th, 1956.

Plath published her first volume of poetry Colossus and Other Poems in October 1960, while Hughes had already published two volumes of poetry, including his award-winning debut The Hawk in the Rain in 1957. When asked if their relationship as partners and poets was in “parallel” or “conflict”, Hughes replied:

Hughes: We’re very alike — we like the same things, live at the same tempo, have the same sort of rhythm in almost every way. But obviously this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments that are extremely different. But they lead secret lives, you see — they content themselves in an imaginative world, so they never really come into open conflict.

He later discussed the processes by which they wrote:

Hughes: What she writes out needn’t be at all the contents of her own mind — it needn’t be anything she knows — but it’s something that somebody in the room knows, or somebody that she’s very close to knows. And, in this way, two people who are sympathetic to each other and who are right, who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, in fact make up one person — they make up one source of power, which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from the single shared mind. … It’s not that you choose the same things to write about, necessarily, and you certainly don’t write about them in the same way — it’s that you draw on an experience, it’s as though you knew more about something than you, from your own life, have ever really learned. . .

It’s a complicated idea to get across, because you’ve first of all to believe in this sort of telepathic union exists between two sympathetic people.

Plath also talked about her childhood, and how her writing developed:

Plath: I think I was happy up to the age of about nine — very carefree — and I believed in magic, which influenced me a great bit. And then, at nine, I was rather disillusioned — I stopped believing in elves and Santa Claus and all these little beneficent powers — and became more realistic and depressed, I think, and then, gradually, became a bit more adjusted about the age of sixteen or seventeen. But I certainly didn’t have a happy adolescence — and, perhaps, that’s partly why I turned specially to writing — I wrote diaries, stories, and so forth. I was quite introverted during those early years.

Between this interview and her tragic, early death in February 1963, Plath was to write her novel The Bell Jar, and the poems that were collected and published posthumously as Ariel in 1965.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Sylvia Plath’s pen and ink drawings exhibited for the first time
 
With thanks to Alan Shields, via Brainpickings

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.24.2014
10:21 am
|
Blacker than ever: Ted Hughes reads from ‘Crow’
09.28.2012
11:02 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness

By the time Ted Hughes published his great and terrible Crow, he was trailing more ghouls than Paulie Walnuts. Assia Wevill had very recently killed herself and their child, and in the same manner (gas) that Sylvia Plath had killed herself six years previously. The figure of Crow is cut from just such black cloth. Hughes described the poems in the following way for the limited edition Crow LP released in 1973:

Finding the right speech for Crow involved me in inventing a longish series of episodes, beginning, in traditional fashion, in heaven, where Crow is created, as part of a wager, by the mysterious, powerful, invisible prisoner of the being men call God. This particular God, of course, is the man-created, broken-down, corrupt despot of a ramshackle religion, who bears about the same relationship to the Creator as, say, ordinary English does to reality.

Surely one of the greatest volumes of English poetry of the last century or so, Crow is terrible and compelling and brilliant, and Hughes makes a fine selection for the following 1996 recording, right through to the relatively gentle coda of “How Water Began to Play” and “Littleblood.”
 

Posted by Thomas McGrath
|
09.28.2012
11:02 am
|
‘Your wife is dead’: Lost Ted Hughes poem about Sylvia Plath’s suicide published
10.07.2010
05:30 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
A poem by Ted Hughes, considered lost, was published today in The New Statesman magazine after being discovered in the British Museum among his papers. In it, Hughes addresses the painful suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. The poem, written in the 70s, would seem to be the “missing link” from Hughes’ 1998 book about his marriage to Plath, Birthday Letters, as none of the poems in that book discuss the circumstances of her death.

Carolyn Kellog, writing at the Los Angeles Times, Jacket Copy blog:

Actor Jonathan Pryce read part of the poem for the [BBC4 Radio] broadcast, reading:

Late afternoon Friday
my last sight of you alive
burning your letter to me
in the ashtray
with that strange smile

Sylvia Plath, who today is best-known as the author of the autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar,” was a young poet living in England when she met Ted Hughes, then also a young poet. The two married in 1956, moved to the U.S. for three years, and then returned to England. They had two children together.

Plath was 30 when she killed herself by inhaling the fumes from an unlit oven. Hughes went on to become one of the significant British poets of the 20th century, serving as British poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

The poem includes how Hughes learned of Plath’s death, in its final lines.

And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
10.07.2010
05:30 pm
|