which post war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia plath?
Answers
Sylvia Plath decided to die on a cold February morning in London. First she stuffed towels and cloths under the door of the bedroom of her two small children, opening their window for fresh air and leaving bread and milk by their beds. Then she sealed the kitchen door, arranged a small folded cloth at the bottom of her oven, turned the gas taps on full, knelt down and carefully placed her head inside. Dying is an art, like everything else, she had written in a poem a few months earlier. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. She died in 1963 at what was just the beginning of a promising career as a novelist and poet. Yet Plath's work and her legend have survived and grown in power and controversy ever since that awful morning. "The Bell Jar," her semi-autobiographical novel, remains a steady seller, as do volumes of her bitter, arresting poetry. She was, in the words of John Updike, "the best, the most exciting and influential, the most ruthlessly original poet of her generation." She also became an American legend, feminist heroine and role model for a generation of women who came of age in the two decades that followed her death. As they retold her story, the theme became woman as artist, victim and martyr. She was idolized as much for her death as for her life and work by those who saw in her passion and pain much of their own. And at the same time her estranged husband, British poet Ted Hughes, became the villain, the jealous male oppressor who had cheated on her and abandoned her to her fate, driving a delicate but enormously gifted woman to despair and, ultimately, self-destruction. Now a new biography, published in recent weeks in both the United States and Britain, seeks to set the record straight. Written with the guidance and collaboration of Hughes's sister Olwyn, literary agent for the Plath estate -- and with more distant guidance from Ted Hughes himself -- "Bitter Fame," by American-born poet Anne Stevenson, has the aura of an authorized biography, yet with a critical difference: While most authorized work makes its subject look good, this particular book appears designed to do just the opposite; it portrays Plath as an intense, obsessive, egotistical, immature, angry, vindictive, petty and deeply troubled woman who unfairly persecuted her husband, lashed out at relatives and friends, and used her poetry and fiction to settle scores. Its critics say that far from redressing the balance, "Bitter Fame" goes too far in the other direction, transforming Plath from saint to Satan, and Ted Hughes from philandering Judas to passive, innocent victim. Its portrait -- which reduces one of America's great modern poets to "a nut-case and a bore," in author Ian Hamilton's words -- is as skewed and unfair as the one it has been designed to correct. It reads as if it were an act of vengeance by the Hugheses against the woman who, by her bitter writings and her suicide, has wreaked vengeance on their own lives. The book has reignited the smoldering controversy over Sylvia Plath's life and death. On a recent television discussion program here, Stevenson was confronted by two of Plath's defenders, British poets Alfred Alvarez and Michelle Roberts, who complained that the book is a heartless and bitter work of revenge that appears to have been orchestrated by Ted and Olwyn Hughes. "It misses absolutely no opportunity whatsoever to put the knife in," said Alvarez, who was a friend of Plath. Stevenson defends herself by saying she stuck to the facts and has solid sources to back up the claims of the book. But she too concedes her book is flawed, and she lays the blame squarely on the Hugheses, who she says insisted on total control over everything that appeared in the book. In a recent telephone interview, Stevenson said Ted Hughes ordered her to delete any passages that sought to explore his role in the marriage's breakup and that Olwyn Hughes insisted on rewriting much of the book. They threatened to withdraw permission for her to quote from Plath's journals and poetry if she refused to submit to their demands, Stevenson said. "I am quite persuaded that the portrait that emerges from 'Bitter Fame' is a pretty accurate portrait of Sylvia Plath," said Stevenson. "But it's really not the book that I wanted to write." Ted Hughes, who remarried in 1970 and is now Britain's poet laureate, has consistently refused to be interviewed about his late wife's life. His sister Olwyn acknowledges that she wrote portions of the Stevenson book and will receive a share of the royalties, but she says her only desire was to set the record straight. "I felt we had to write a book now before everybody who knew Sylvia dies," she said in a brief telephone interview.
Silvia Plath married Ted Huges in 1956. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. They lived together in the United States and after that in England. They got separated in 1962. She committed suicide and died in 1963. Edward James Huges was a children's writer of English. He is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.