like fury...
void’ is the best you can do; I’m eternally suspicious of editorializing with horribles, terribles, awfuls, and hideouses; make the void horrible; let your reader have the sweet joy of exclaiming: ‘ah! horrible!’”. Perhaps Plath’s most insightful note is on complexity, “you must, wicked one, help the reader (probably I will be your most niggling demanding one) to read, because you know, your syntax is very difficult; as you admit yourself, your poems are damn hard to read, they are so complex, and so you must be careful to the death not to let any mere mechanical complexity ---punctuation, grammar--- obstruct.” Nevertheless, Plath is just as observant on what she admires in his work, such as his “athletic inwoven metaphor which makes description both realistic, psychologically valid and musical”. Plath then introduces the poem she has enclosed on the final page, Street Song, and invites Ted’s criticism, “I am enclosing my sentimental one; be strict in criticizing, for you are my proper lens; even if you know I am blithering on about how I love you, it is a poem, and, as such, can be attacked brutally.” She signs off by begging Ted to come to London the next weekend, “I can work amaz- ingly hard if I have something to live for. You. Next weekend. I love you like fury... your own sylvia”. Overleaf Plath has typed out Street Song, adding at the end “(I have copies of my ones, so just write about them and rip apart in your letters)” and signed it “love, s.” An important letter, showing the close literary collaboration between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and the debt his success owed to her criticism, endeavour and enterprise. Plath had written to Peter Davison then a staff member at The Atlantic (and later a long-serv - ing Poetry Editor), the previous week, partly in order to update him on her life and work, but chiefly to introduce him to the work of Ted Hughes, “this writer I found is named Ted Hughes... I became his agent, as it were, in America, and so far, he’s received enthusiastic acceptances... He is a brilliant writer and London and England are too small for him.” She was endeavouring to get Ted’s poems in front of the magazine’s editor Edward Weeks, hav - ing already secured his work places in August issues of Poetry and Nation . In addition to the poems, she had written to Davison about Ted’s children’s fables, and conveys to Ted here that she will type them all up and send them off to the The Atlantic . In addition to acting as Ted’s agent and typist, the rest of the letter shows her role as an essen - tial critic of his work. Particular attention is given to a poem Plath calls ‘Horses Of The Sun’, a poem that Christopher Reid in The Letters Of Ted Hughes has described as an early version of ‘The Horses’, which appeared in The Hawk In The Rain. If he is correct, then Plath’s sug -
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