On the Life-and-Death Cycles at the Heart of Sylvia Plath’s Work

In 1971, eight years after Sylvia Plath died, a dispute over the backstory of her death broke out between her husband Ted Hughes and the poet and critic Al Alvarez. Alvarez, a friend of Plath, published a book which, in part, claimed that Plath “did not intend to die” with her suicide—that it was rather “a cry for help that fatally misfired.” In response, Hughes published a letter in The Times Literary Supplement in which he asked for the section about Plath from Alvarez’s book to be removed. We