My dear friend Kate Moses rendered Sylvia Plath so three-dimensionally in her novel, Wintering, that I now feel compelled to read any Plath-infused story I find. Yesterday it was the New York Times piece on the Ted Hughes letters, a piece that concluded with the following lines:
Earlier, while Plath was still alive and they were together, there is his unstinting reassurance, rejoicing in her successes and praising her work. Above all, after her death there is his searing defense of her shattering “Ariel” poems. To Donald Hall, an admirer who nevertheless found “Ariel” too sensational to be first-rate poems, he wrote:
“Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do,” Hughes wrote. “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”
A mantra then, a new one: Let us not argue ourselves out of the bruises art delivers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/books/03book.html?ref=books