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"Writing poetry for children is a curious occupation": Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Article Excerpt
The flashy Ted and Sylvia story is Line big-screen biopic--with Gwyneth Paltrow in the starring role. For more serious students of literature, there are other stories. There is Ted's version in his verse collection, Birthday Letters (1998), ostensibly written to Sylvia on birthdays long after her death. And there is Sylvia's version, in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000). I'd like to tell a different Ted and Sylvia story. It's a literary story; it's an American story--and it has a Horn Book connection. For the most part, my story takes place in Massachusetts, in Northampton and Boston, between the summer of 1957 and December 1959. It was there and then, at the beginning of their intimate creative partnership, that Ted and Sylvia negotiated the hazardous transformation from promising to professional writers; where they began to acknowledge formally the possibilities of writing poetry and prose for children as well as for adults.

Because beginnings make most sense when viewed from endings, my story begins at the end, in the archives at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where Ted's papers and books are now housed. There, among the two-and-a-half tons of archival material he gave to Emory, are two files classified as unidentified notes on "children's writing and teaching." They contain loose sheets of yellow scratch pad, unlined and undated (though they appear to be from a late stage in his career), on which Ted has written rough drafts for an apparently unproduced radio program. The rhythmically elegant phrase "writing poetry for children is a curious occupation" appears repeatedly as Ted tries out various ways of writing something that will resolve--as elegantly as the opening phrase--the inherent conflicts he sketches among producers, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers of children's poetry. Here's one version as Ted tries to articulate the problem:

And the most curious thing about it is that we think children need a special kind of poetry. Each writer for children has his own idea of what that is.... Publishers, of course, know that poetry is not sold to children--it is sold to their parents or teachers. So this is the barrier to publishing children's poetry. The author thinks he knows what they want, or need, the teachers or parents think they know best. And the publisher thinks he knows best what poet & teacher think they know best. And we all think differently. Each author writing for children thinks the same--and all write differently.

Although Ted is talking about writing poetry for children, his remarks apply equally well to his prose. Poets always write as poets--tuned to rhythm, imagery, and feeling. Every phrase, every sentence, is carefully balanced so that it is held in perfect tension with the structure as a whole. But the main concern of this passage, as Ted tries to explain, is the problem of audience relations: Who is the text for? Adults or children? Who publishes it? Who buys it? Who knows best?

One craftily simple way Ted resolved the audience problem was by publishing, without comment, the same poem in different collections--some marked as being for children, some not. But that was a partial solution at best. He cared deeply about nurturing imaginative life and was attracted to the idea that children "are more fluid and alert" than adults. He was also troubled by the speed with which that openness was closed down and sealed up, hidden, as he says, behind a "space helmet." That's one reason Ted was so concerned with audience and characterized that audience much as traditional storytellers might have characterized their undifferentiated audiences of adults and children. In a 1984 letter to me, "Fed described the kind of writing that might reach such an audience as a "lingua franca"--that is, "a style of communication for which children are the specific audience, but which adults can overhear ... and listen, in a way secretly--as children." And it appears that Ted was attempting to compose in that style, that "lingua franca," as early as 1956, on his honeymoon in Spain...

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