Mad Girl's Love Song

(Click here for Poem Text)

For years I thought that Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems was the definitive edition. I was aware that Ted Hughes was berated for lumping together most of the material written before he met Plath as "Juvenilia" and it was indeed clear that a lot of these poems were deserving of inclusion in the main body of work. Perhaps Hughes was not then aware that his own Collected Poems would include true Juvenilia such as "Wild West" written when he was 16 :

I'll tell you a tale of Carson McReared,
Who, south of the 49th was feared
Greater than any man ever before,
And men went in fear of his .44,
For he'd shoot the ears from any man
From Two-Gun Ted to Desperate Dan.

There ain't nothin' like that in Sylvia's Collected Poems. And there should be. We deserve nothing less than a matching complete edition. The title of this entry is also the title of this recent Plath Biography by Andrew Wilson which I've just finished reading, only after forcing myself to turn the internet off while I read it to stop myself looking up diverting details on The Interwebs.

In Forbidden Planet Action Figure terminology this is "Next Wave". After the crop of biographies gathered temporally around Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's detailed but definitely-flawed biography, (written jointly as Stephenson almost put it, with Hughes' sister Olwyn - so much so that it might have been better to attribute the book to a literary equivalent of Alan Smithee), there has been a gap of some years with just academic volumes. The fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death has sparked a new crop of popular biographies and the absence of Ted from the world seems to have lessened his family's desire to manage his image and to have allowed a refocusing of the analysis on Plath's life away from his influence.

Mad Girl's Love Song does indeed leave Ted as a blurry presence at the beginning and the end though last word really belongs to Richard Sassoon, who although a major presence in all the previous biographies, seems to have become The Colossus that Plath aspired to, and despite only having a few emails and stories from Sassoon, Wilson manages to give us a clear idea of his and Plath's relationship in a way I've not seen before. The pivot point of the timelines of Plath, Hughes and Sassoon is described well, in a way which re-balances this triangle of egos in a way which puts Plath and not Hughes at the apex. Sassoon is still alive and I am sad that he is not more well-known. Maybe he was never after the fame which Plath both craved and achieved but from this book it is clear that he had the intellect to match Plath and to obviously surpass Hughes.

I've always tried to step back from the vitriol that Hughes seems to attract and I still want to but the problem, as a fictitious academic with mild Aphasia once said of a past paramour, the trouble was that he had such a small .... what is the word .... intellect. Well when compared to Plath that is true.