Sylvia Plath would have turned sixty-six this year, and it’s hard to imagine that burning, frantic, misshapen talent receiving Social Security. She died unwrinkled as a Romantic, older than Shelley but younger than Byron. Whether her talent would have developed further is that deceitful question we ask those who die young—the poems might have continued in angry gouts, or found domestic contentments, or withered up completely. She might have ended a fussy old Wordsworth, blowzy embarrassment to the Plathites who made her a feminist martyr; more likely she’d have reveled in each new award, a grande dame cigarette-waving into her seventh decade, unrepentant as an aging Hollywood star.

Plath is a crucial figure in American poetry. Understudy to confessional poets who were older, even much older, she exceeded their worst nightmares—however darkly Robert Lowell’s madness rises into his poems, he sounds like a scholar in slippers compared to her (“My mind’s not right” isn’t half as scary as “Lady Lazarus,” though it’s better poetry). Ariel (1965) was not just the climax—it was the end of confessional poetry. No matter how shocking the revelation or how steely the revealer, every confessing poet afterward suffered her terms of engagement.

Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, which in January burst unexpected into print, includes three decades of poems written secretly to his dead wife (only a few had appeared in print before).[1]Hughes has been famously silent about Plath’s suicide, and just as famously stoic in the face of thirty years