...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened in the hope of correcting some fantasy I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In 1989 with Hughes under public attack a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent. During his time in Mexborough he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby which he said he would come to know "better than any place on earth".

His last poetic work Birthday Letters (1998) explored their complex relationship. His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. Edward James "Ted" Hughes OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer.