The former, known for its surrealistic imagery, was open to multiple interpretations. But only in 2004 did two of them – “Thalidomide” and “The Rabbit Catcher” – appear in an updated version.
Most of these poems were eventually included in the collection “ Ariel,” which was published posthumously in 1965. 11, 1963, after having written the most important poems of her life during the six months before her death. The two soon conceived again and their child, Nick, was born on Jan. Clark asserts the miscarriage likely took place on Monday, Feb. Her unborn child, about four months along, died within days. When Hughes found Plath in this rage, he began striking her repeatedly. Plath was furious that he could have been having an affair while simultaneously being, as she wrote, so “impervious” to the “innumerable little umbilical cords” that tied her to her unborn child and 10-month-old girl. She broke a mahogany table that was an heirloom of Ted’s. She began tearing her husband’s writings into long strips. To Plath, this response was evidence of an affair. It was the influential BBC personality Moira Doolan on the other line, and Doolan seemed startled to hear anyone but Ted answering. Evening Standard/Getty ImagesĪs Clark explains in “Red Comet,” one day in early February 1961, Plath, who was four months pregnant, answered the phone at her home in Devon, England.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had a turbulent relationship. In the letters – which span the most volatile era of Plath’s marriage, writing and eventual suicide – Plath opens up about topics she didn’t discuss with anyone else. 4, 1963, Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to psychologist Ruth Beuscher. To me, this new biographical information, together with Plath’s drafts and journal entries, reveals how she channeled this painful experience into her poetry. But no scholarship has yet to contextualize the painful event as a means to reinterpret two of Plath’s most autobiographical poems, “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Thalidomide.”Īs a scholar of 20th-century American poetry, I teach Plath regularly in my university classrooms and direct graduate theses about her works. Heather Clark’s recent biography of Plath, “ Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” includes this new information. In 2017, one of Sylvia Plath’s private letters, which had previously not been made public, included a startling revelation: Plath suggested that her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was responsible for the miscarriage of their child in February 1961.
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