Ted Hughes

The poetry of Ted Hughes presents his own personal perspective behind his experiences with Sylvia Plath, within a condensed intimate and emotional form that persuaded me to embrace his perspective. Plath's poems, however, in an equally persuasive way, presented a contrary 'perspective" Al Alvarez, in her autobiography "Where did it all go right?" uses a different form to present his perspective on the perspective. Ultimately we must conclude that each of these representations is of merit, in communicating a personal perspective.

Hughes, in The Shot examines his version of the perspective behind Plath's relationship with him and her father He suggests that she was a "god-seeker", and sources her dependency from her father: "the god with the smoking gun". Indeed, he uses the extended metaphor of Plath as a bullet to suggest that she was "trajectory perfect"
for her death: "you were gold-jacketed, solid-silver, nickel-tipped". He enforces his own naive innocence with the simile "vague as mist". Critic Erica Wagner suggests that Hughes uses "uneven, unexpected, consonant-heavy rhymes to hammer the reader with his perspective". In this way, his representation is indeed persuasive. It is argued that he attempts to establish his status as a victim after much criticism following Plath’s suicide. This awareness of audience is no doubt a factor in his poetry's persuasiveness, although Wagner suggests that for Hughes "there was no poem that did not come from an inner-perspective". Al Alvarez presents a different "perspective" in her autobiography. He suggests that Hughes "handed Plath the key" to the "cellcage that was her mind". Here he uses
metaphor and emotive language to appeal to his audience and achieve his purpose - to characterise Hughes in a negative way. On other occasions, however, Alvarez uses a formal register and biographical tone to add credibility to his argument. This combination has led to Alvarez's views beginning what Janet Malcolm called a "feminist...