Do we have a right to read this?
Of course, there is no way that the former Poet Laureate could know that he was going to die shortly after publishing the book Birthday Letters in which he, for the first time, released poems written to his ex-wife. These were poems of deeply personal nature:
"I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." Taken from 'Visit' by Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, 1999Up until this point. the relationship between the two literary powerhouses following Plath's untimely death had been something which Hughes dealt with in silence, despite constant literary interventions and 'cultural tabloid' excursions into their family life.
Releasing hitherto undiscovered writings of the Poet Laureate is in the public interest for the purposes of furthering knowledge and sharing literature of the highest calibre. Lord Bragg described it as the missing keystone of the Birthday Letters sequence of poems addressed to Plath by Hughes.
This may well be so, but when Birthday Letters was made publicly available, Hughes provided the exception which proved the rule. When selecting the contents of his final collection, he made a conscious decision not to include this letter.
We do not know the reason why this poem didn't make the final cut, perhaps it was not thought to be of sufficient quality to be included, or perhaps - and more significantly - it was a piece of personal literature that the author wrote for himself.
In the absence of any discernible right to privacy it seems that the desire for the dissemination and desecration of personal papers overrules any decision to withhold this text. Upon death the legacy of the life defining decisions erodes in the clamour to reveal the most closely guarded thoughts. Dust to dust. Nothing is sacred.
