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The young Ted Hughes was thwarted in various of his career ambitions. Astrologer? Yes, but “there are all kinds of laws about witchcraft and fortune tellers”. Australian mink-farmer? “I am all set for a fortune. There is only one snag.” Join the men of the BBC? “More nauseous than any other external objects I have encountered.” The early letters of the future poet laureate reveal many of his lifelong obsessions, from furry animals to the occult, mostly in a financially anxious form.

In 1951, Cambridge was a “purse without money” where “the gutters run pure claret', wonderful at some times but at others “a ditch full of clear water where all the frogs have died”. Four years later Hughes was a security guard at a girder factory, wondering if a life of poetry could be paid for by becoming a university landlord.

His first letter to Sylvia Plath in Paris begins: “That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.” The note ends more practically: “And bring back brandy [underlined]. Two bottles. Broach one to please the customs”. The next letter to his elder sister, Olwyn, discusses both the new lover's star signs (“Scorpio, moon in Libra... and her Mars smash on my Sun”) and her attractive willingness to send off his poems to contacts on “immensely paying American mags”.

A “Selected Letters” is not a biography, as the editor of this volume, Christopher Reid, makes clear. But from this point on, the reader inevitably prepares to follow the Plath/Hughes tragedy like an audience in an ancient Athenian theatre. The essential plot is known to all: Plath writes some of the finest poems of the century; she and Hughes marry, have two children, separate; she kills herself; Hughes has left her for another woman who also kills herself. The interest in any new book lies in the diversions.

“Plath cultists”, feminist admirers in America as fanatical as any mystic Greeks, will shudder once again at the laconic notes for February 1963: “Dear Olwyn, On Monday morning at about 6am Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral is in Heptonstall next Monday.” Hughes gradually gives his own explanation, the dangerous early morning gaps between “one pill and the next”, the sedatives she was prescribed, her psychiatric disorders. There is loving admiration, as well as rage that her “clairvoyant” knowledge of his movements came from her paid “snoop”.

Real sympathy for the survivor builds only slowly. In a letter in 1987 he sets out how “Sylvia's legend is now so out of hand that, my casual words are whole new adventures, new ogres and catastrophes for the bards of the cult”. Plath's mother produces a book portraying an innocent American girl who can only have been corrupted by another, a “sugar idol” who becomes a “divine icon”.

Hughes recognises that he has colluded in this picture by his silence and that “my own poor books have led a strange kidnapped life — in the world of this Almighty pious lie”. The story is all the more chilling than in the biographical versions. But I doubt if many minds will be changed.

There is excellent abuse. After signing a long letter to the critic A. Alvarez in 1971, Hughes begins an ominous “And another thing. Not even temporary insanity would explain your completely false remarks implying that there was some kind of artistic jealousy between Sylvia and me... Both of us regarded you as a friend, not a Daily Mirror TV key-hole rat-hole journalist.”

There is also touching encouragement for the young — especially for Frieda, his daughter. His abhorrence of party politics and the Thatcherite ascendancy makes him think hard about accepting the poet laureateship. A devotion to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales helps him to make up his mind — and to enjoy the role.

There is the standard literary regard for one's fellows — with many a characteristic twist. An evening of Harold Pinter, “the stuffed head of a white walrus mounted on the tail of a bad herring”; Donald Davie, “a kind of parasite in the crutch and armpit of poetry”; Philip Larkin, “spermicide”. John Gummer may not enjoy the 1986 description of him as fisheries minister: “looks somehow like a paper clip, a bit like a going-out tray loosely jammed into a coming-in tray, a bit like a cold cup of instant coffee at 10-20”.

Students of Hughes's poetry can read detailed versions of how and where the inspiration came. Those who share his love of second sight and coincidence may enjoy reading how in 1962, needing to sell his second-rate poems as well as his best ones, he suggested that a friend send out his work under pseudonyms: “I'm going to invent a rival poet, or perhaps two, who will gradually become much better than me.” His first choice of alias? The name of that most completely political party man of his era — John Major.

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid

Faber, £30; 800pp

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