Great Regulars: [Ted Hughes'] narratives unfold not

in the boys' own locales of his early verse stories or the writings of such as Kipling or Conrad--whose novels he used to read to Sylvia Plath each evening in Devon, while she worked ferociously on her rag-rug--but either in the "dark hole" of his head or in the equally "dark hole" of poverty-stricken, post-empire, postwar, utility England, where all, as Plath liked to point out, was the color of dinge. "England/Was so poor!" he recalls her exclaiming in a corrosive diatribe in "The Beach," included in Birthday Letters ; is everything black, she demands, because black paint is cheaper?

from Powells: Review-A-Day: The Myths of Ted Hughes

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