SOURCE: Bundtzen, Lynda K. “Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath's ‘Burning the Letters.’” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 3 (Fall, 1998): 434-51.

In the following essay, Bundtzen examines “Burning the Letters” for its clues to the nature of Plath and Hughes's relationship.

Only they have nothing to say to anybody. I have seen to that. 

—Sylvia Plath, “Burning the Letters”

What was in those manuscripts, the one destroyed like a Jew in Nazi Germany, the other lost like a desaparecido?

—Steven Gould Axelrod, “The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath”

 Sticks and stones may break your bones, But words can never harm you. 

In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes confessed to destroying one of Sylvia Plath's “maroon-backed ledgers” and losing another. They “continued the record from late '59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because...