Clark, Heather. The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Oxford University Press: 2011.
In a BBC interview, Hughes claims that he and Plath have “a single, shared mind,” a “Telepathic union” that constitutes a “source of a great deal” in his poetry, “but then emphasizes that when they happen to write about the same subject, they always approach it differently” (1).
In Hughes letters, he admits that “Sylvia & I plundered each other merrily,” and claims to have “designed prototypes, which she put into full Germanic production” (qtd here 3).
Plath and Hughes fall right into Bloom’s anxiety of influence. “Plath’s ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather,’ for instance, might be termed an ‘inspired misreading’ of Hughes’s ‘The Hawk in the Rain,’ while ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a more willful, parodic revision of several Hughes poems. Hughes’s ‘View of a Pig’ is, by his own admission, a gentle critique of Plath’s ‘Sow,’ but his latter poems in Birthday Letters challenge Plath’s inheritance” (10).
Critics have taken for granted that Hughes is in the “strong” poet in the Plath-Hughes dialectic
Hughes believed in Plath’s poetry, but feared becoming her: the domestic and its stifling confines terrified him (48)
The White Goddess became “talismanic” for Hughes, and he wrote in his letters that it was “the chief holy book of my poetic conscience… in particular, I suppose, what really interested me were those supernatural women. Especially the underworld women” (qtd here 59).
“Plath was destined to become, for Hughes, the human embodiment of the White Goddess – a role she was happy to play for some time, but which she eventually saw as both reductive and repressive” (61).
“Hughes’s nature poems are really war poems in disguise; we might also think of his war poems as marriage poems in disguise” (65).
His Letters show that he was aware of Graves’s warning “that one cannot serve Goddess and wife at the same time” (qtd here 65)
Clark argues that Ariel constitutes “a caricature of Hughes’s poetic femme fatales,” which is, necessarily, a caricature of the Goddess. “She looked to his poems now to mock, to impersonate, to emasculate, to argue, and to flaunt a parodic version of her obedient self” (131).
We should be careful reading this as a liberatory move, however; “her dangerous, predatory women are not voices of self-assertion, but self-annihilation” (134).
Hughes’s Crow “is often engaged in a battle to break free from the great mother, or what D.H. Lawrence termed the ‘Mater Magna’ in Women in Love” (193).
A. L. Duck 