The letters explicate these writings at a length and with a wooliness that make them seem virtually gnomic by comparison. Even a minor tribute to the Queen Mother, written as part of his poet laureate duties, takes her maiden name (Bowes-Lyon) to fill four pages with the symbolism of lions. A letter to Aurelia Plath, his mother-in-law, endlessly analyzing an unproduced play, prompts Sylvia to advise her not to take this kind of thing too seriously. He himself admits that it was “obscure” and “tedious.”  For a poet, such grotesquely outsized commentary on his own work suggests a decided lack of confidence. “A poem should not mean/but be,” Archibald MacLeish wrote; and Hughes’s interminable glosses on his poems make you wonder whether he thinks they quite exist.  Undoubtedly it is his letters to and about Sylvia Plath that will hold the widest interest; they also contain some of his most directly expressive writing. Before getting to them, though, there are some splendid perceptions among the mass of explicating, along with biographical material that is useful, though not especially revealing.  Early on, he writes an account of a bullfight worthy of his best young poems. It is all on the bull’s side; not on account of cruelty, but because he saw one of his great mythical beasts being brought down by pygmies. He ends with an extraordinary line: “It’s surprising how much a bull learns during a fight, but by the time it’s learned it, it’s too late. It is full of holes and has no blood left.”  On T. S. Eliot at dinner: “His smile is like that of a person recovering from some serious operation.” To Anne Sexton on the danger of favorable reviews: “They separate you from your devil, which hates being observed.”  And his comparison of American and English fishermen is at the excruciating heart of his dislike of the United States. (Fishing, he comes to believe, is a superior form of writing poetry; many of the last letters tell of expeditions to Ireland, Alaska and Africa.) For Americans, he writes, the image is of a lavishly accoutered figure grandly facing “some proud king of the deeps.” The image in the English mind “is of some clown sitting in pouring rain fishing in a pool that has a great notice ‘Petrol Dump.’ ”  The story of Hughes and Plath — their passionate early relationship, their exuberant poetic collaboration and bitter quarrels, his adulteries and abandonment and her suicide — has been endlessly related. Hughes has been variously cast as the villain and the victimized; as suppressor of parts of her writing; and as Plath’s most faithful curator. He refused to make his version public until he published the poems, “Birthday Letters,” in 1998, a few months before his death.  The real letters, which the “Birthday” volume draws from, represent his voice, not hers. It is, frequently, an eloquent and moving voice. There is anguish over Plath’s death, the confession to Olwyn that their quarrels had blinded him to her need of him.  There is his stiffening over the years in the face of attacks by feminists and others; and an angry insistence that the living — himself, their children, Sylvia’s mother — were being injured by them. There is a weariness with having to live among a cloud of opinions, even those that came to his defense. “The dogs in the street seem to have more ideas about me than I have.”  Earlier, while Plath was still alive and they were together, there is his unstinting reassurance, rejoicing in her successes and praising her work. Above all, after her death there is his searing defense of her shattering “Ariel” poems. To Donald Hall, an admirer who nevertheless found “Ariel” too sensational to be first-rate poems, he wrote:  “Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do,” Hughes wrote. “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”  Selected and edited by Christopher Reid  Illustrated. 758 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $45.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E39 of the New York edition with the headline: Yours Sincerely: A Poet on Fish, Bulls and Love. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Ted Hughes’s letters contain some splendid perceptions and useful biographical material — among a mass of interminable explication.