SOURCE: "What Happens in the Heart," in Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 18, No. 6, November/December, 1998, pp. 3, 12-3.

[In the following interview, Hughes shares personal revelations about his relationship with Sylvia Plath.]

Just when every literary critic and Sylvia Plath devotee thought that they had sorted out the truth about Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, along came the February 27, 1998, publication of Hughes' Birthday Letters, a remarkable sequence of love poems about his and Plath's tumultuous seven-year marriage. In front-page articles on both sides of the Atlantic, critics and poetry lovers speculated as to why Hughes, Britain's Poet Laureate since 1984, had abruptly broken his unrelenting and controversial silence about his life with Plath, 35 years after she laid her head on a gas oven door and committed suicide. Nobody, it seemed, had any idea that Hughes was quietly composing this poetic memoir over the last three decades.

Nobody, that is, except a...