Nine years in the making, “Red Comet” takes us on a literary picaresque, drawing on untapped archives, Plath’s complete correspondence, interviews with surviving members of the couple’s social and professional circles, and, most crucially, on Hughes’ journals and letters.
Which is to say: They were artists first, spouses second. … Her lines should be, above all, ‘clear and vivid.’ ” ‘How about another word for ‘hideous’? I’d like better something that showed the eyes hideous, as in the fine ‘Snake’s twisted eye.’ … Hughes responded in kind … he advised her to dispense with unnecessary adjectives. Newly married, the couple were bewitched by the muse each found in the other and yet both maintained a critical approach in their close readings.Īs Clark observes, “Plath criticized Hughes’s poems insightfully and confidently.
Halfway through “Red Comet,” Heather Clark’s incandescent, richly researched biography of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), there’s a revelatory anecdote that strikes at the heart of the creative partnership between the poet and her husband, British writer Ted Hughes.
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