cornelia d. j. pearsall
this assumed familiarity, articulating a personal longing for the deceased poet. Her
termsreflect what appears to have been for her the immediacy of the shock of his
death: ‘Both of us mourn this poet immensely’; ‘His death is really a terrible blow.’
Plath’s letter conveys her sense that securing a posthumous reputation for Douglas
is a joint commitment: ‘weare trying to resurrect his image and his poems’. If so, it
was among the last of their shared marital projects. Within a month of these June
letters, Plath learned of Hughes’s burgeoning affair with Assia Wevill, and their
separation and the dissolution of the marriage had begun.
The letter to Hughes from the poet’s mother, Marie J. Douglas, to which the
letters of both Hughes and Plath refer, has proved elusive (it may have been
destroyed in Plath’s bonfire of Hughes’s papers after he left Court Green), but
Hughes’s letters to Marie Douglas are preserved in the Douglas Papers in the British
Library. Writing from Devon, in a letter postmarked 10 June 1962, he describes the
evolution of his admiration for her son’s poetry, beginning with his discovery of it
in an anthology:
And I then procured a copy of his Collection, with great difficulty, from an American book
dealer. Since then, I’ve become as familiar with his poetry as with any, and it seems to me
to get better and better. I had hoped, by this broadcast, to urge somebody to re-publish his
poems, but I shall not stop at a broadcast. I think your son must have been a kind of man
one looks for in vain among the survivors, and even among much of history.^5
Hughes’s intimacy with Douglas’s poetry spanned the remainder of his own career.
In 1987 he published a lengthy introduction to a new edition of Douglas, in which
his admiration had if anything increased, the poems having continued, in the
intervening twenty-five years, to ‘get better and better’. In his 1962 letter to his sister
he proclaims Douglas ‘one of the best [poets] ever’, given his early death, while
in unpublished notes for his 1987 introduction to another Douglas collection he
calls him ‘one of the most purely gifted poets ever born in England’.^6 His letter to
Douglas’s mother refers to the poet in as personal a cast as had Plath’s letter to her
mother; his intimate knowledge of the poetry, with which he is ‘as familiar...as
with any’, extends to an assumption of intimate knowledge of the man. Douglas
comes to Hughes after having been searched for, having been ‘look[ed] for in vain
among the survivors’, not only of the most recent war but ‘among much of history’.
Loot
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Ted Hughes did not need to look far to find European war ‘survivors’. His poetry
periodically recurs to the burden shouldered by his family of the extraordinary
(^5) Hughes to Marie J. Douglas, n.d. [June 1962], British Library Manuscripts, Add. 59833.
(^6) Hughes, Ted Hughes Papers (MSS 644), Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory
University.