Sylvia Plath - Poetry's Lioness

"The real problem with Hughes’ interference is that we can’t separate the emotional relationship from the intellectual, artistic relationship—and we don’t trust Hughes to, either. But from this distance Plath seems fortunate to have had his input. It’s easy to forget now how radical Plath’s poetry—with its elemental female anger, its sexual voracity, its self-loathing knowingness—was in 1963. A number of the poems Plath wrote in 1961 and 1962 had been turned down by editors who didn’t understand them. Plath’s publishers in the U.K. didn’t want to publish Ariel, nor could Hughes convince Knopf, in the United States, to publish the new poems. “People didn’t understand what they were getting at, or didn’t like what they saw,” the critic A. Alvarez later told Janet Malcolm. Hughes did get Plath’s poems. And in a strange way, there is something moving about what he did. It is surely an emotionally complicated task to spend two years carefully reorganizing the work of your dead wife so as to persuade someone to publish a book that will implicate you in her tragic fate. And the irony is that, in reorganizing Ariel to emphasize the ultimate price of Plath’s emotional injuries, Hughes, like Samson, brought down the walls of the temple around him, even as he helped his wife take flight."

Ariel Redux (via wemakestorm)