Good luck with that!, one feels like saying to Jonathan Bate, the latest to enter these emotionally charged precincts, as he lays out the “cardinal rule” he aspired to follow in tackling a new consideration of Hughes: “The work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical.” An Oxford professor and a Shakespeare scholar who has written a highly regarded biography of the Romantic poet John Clare, Bate approached his task with dutiful care, winning the cooperation of Hughes’s formidable sister and longtime literary agent, Olwyn Hughes. He was also granted permission to quote unpublished material from the gigantic archive of Hughes’s work, a large part of which had been sold to the British Library by Hughes’s widow, Carol.

And then, abruptly, permission was revoked in 2014, when Bate was nearly finished. Messy life could not be kept at bay. Bate claimed that the estate pulled back because he had turned up evidence, in Hughes’s private journals, of things unknown to his wife and sister, presumably relationships with other women. The estate put it differently, voicing impatience at his resistance to sharing his ongoing work, and concern that he was straying from his professed focus on Hughes’s writing. The result has been double-edged. Bate had to rewrite the book, losing some immediacy as he resorted to paraphrase and made do with short quotations of copyrighted material. But he’s also gained a certain cachet with that Unauthorised now in his subtitle. It’s a badge of honor for anyone treading on Plath-Hughes terrain, evidence that an uncompromising biographer hasn’t been swayed by interested parties (read: Olwyn Hughes).

Was the Hughes estate right to be worried? Not really. The book is magisterially respectful of Hughes, treating him throughout as an unquestionably great poet. Bate is particularly good on Hughes’s working-class childhood in rural Yorkshire, and the deep involvement with wild animals that anchored his imaginative life until the end. “There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish,” Hughes wrote in his book Poetry in the Making. “I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.” Hughes found a complementary source of wildness studying archeology and anthropology at Cambridge, where he met Plath in 1956. Her diary entry is legendary: “That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.”

Bate tends to adopt a Hughesian view of events in the poet's life, as well as of women, whether “staggeringly beautiful” or “dumpy.” He’s inclined to withhold moralizing judgment, which leads him to a rather strained assessment of Hughes’s post-Plath history of womanizing, suggesting that “his infidelity to others was a form of fidelity” to Plath and her memory. As for their relationship, where others have played up the turmoil, Bate stresses their youth—Hughes was 32 when Plath, then 30, died—and the intimacy of their marriage, the two of them “becoming one soul.” Bate notes the feverish overlap in their work. Plath begins a poem, “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here,” while Hughes, in his more lurid way, writes in his journal, “The red tulips—hearts terrifyingly vivid terrible. Organs pulsing something red and uncontrollable.” Bate plausibly suggests that Plath’s vivid sequence of poems about her father’s beekeeping might owe something to Hughes’s interest in animals. Her suspicions about Otto Plath’s supposed sympathy for Hitler might in turn have infiltrated Hughes’s often anthologized “Hawk Roosting,” with its very Plathian line “I kill where I please because it is all mine.”

Harper

In Bate’s view, the sheer intensity of the relationship placed constraints on both poets, a couple simultaneously reveling in and chafing at their shared isolation. Evoking the cultural mood, he cites “The Jaguar,” from Hughes’s celebrated first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The caged beast is seen “hurrying enraged / Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes / On a short fierce fuse.” And yet, Hughes writes, “there’s no cage to him … His stride is wildernesses of freedom.” According to Bate, “This is the fate of the human spirit confined in dreary Fifties Britain.” For her part, Plath, on the brink of a big career, felt cut off from literary London by Hughes’s rural, solitary preferences. “I miss brains,” she wrote to her mother. “Hate this cow life.”