The untimely death of the young, lovely and talented is always fodder for myth-making but the ingredients in the Plath-hughes story were so spectacularly juicy, they inspired a thousand half-baked rumours and accusations that were as vicious as they were

day Plath was adopted as a feminist cause celebre. And as a recent spat over a missing acknowledgement in Plath’s posthumously published work shows, even now it takes little to ignite fresh recriminations and rekindle the controversy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as the furore raged, Hughes was almost unable to go out in public. He was issued with death threats and was ambushed by placard-carrying protesters, be it in Aberystwyth or Adelaide. He once regretfully turned down an invitation to read at an event in Edinburgh to honour Norman MacCaig, saying the publicity he would attract would ruin the evening. He was even openly accused in print of beating and murdering Plath. Meanwhile, her headstone, in a country graveyard near the Hughes family home in Yorkshire, was repeatedly vandalised, her married name rudely scratched out.

In the face of intolerable provocation, Hughes stayed silent. Writing to Plath’s biographer, Anne Stevenson, he explained his omerta: “I preferred it, on the whole, to allowing myself to be dragged out into the bull-ring and teased and pricked and goaded into vomiting up every detail of my life with Sylvia for the higher entertainment of the hundred thousand Eng Lit Profs and graduates who ... feel very little in this case beyond curiosity of a quite low order, the ... popular bloodsport kind.”

NOT until the publication of Birthday Letters in 1998 did he break cover. These intimate, searching poems, almost all addressed to Sylvia, were his celebration, and mourning, of her. The collection, which is among his finest work, was published only when he knew he was close to death. One of the cruel consequences of Plath’s suicide is that her work, and Hughes’s, has been overshadowed by their almost Shakespearean tragedy. For 50 years no-one has been able to read their poems without remembering what the authors suffered. Some, indeed, cannot bring themselves to read Hughes, or Plath, as the case may be. And readers are always expected to take sides.

This is, in itself, little short of a tragedy. Plath’s writing is diminished if read as an extended suicide note. While The Bell Jar is a gripping if uneven first novel, her poetry is in a class of its own, pyrotechnic work that lies far above gossip and speculation. With Hughes, the sombre, almost primitive power of his work, rooted in the English soil, speaks for itself.

The controversy that continues to smoulder around their names does a great disservice to both, reducing them to players in a soap opera, rather than two of the world’s finest poets. Those who have claimed Plath as a martyr to the feminist cause rather than a literary giant could not have more demeaned her had they wanted to blacken her name rather than burnish it.

Reducing her to a victim misses the essence and vitality of her personality. Her work is the howling cry of a woman who will not be defeated or dismissed, who lashes out at a painful world, rather than suffer in silence. The flesh as well as the bones of this woman, who once described herself as “over- exposed, like an X- ray”, can be found in her poems. There, thankfully, she remains breathtakingly alive.