Sculpture
Trapped by Poetry (2013)
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at Cambridge University. They were introduced by my uncle, the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who, like Plath, was a Fulbright Scholar and fellow American. This sculpture tries to depict the relationship between Hughes and Plath – one a dominating, subjugating, overpowering man, the other a depressive, introspective, melancholy woman, trapped by her partner in poetry and eventually driven to suicide.
Quote under Plath:
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out – looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
Quote under Hughes:
My last sight of you alive,
Burning your last letter to me…
Yet with that strange smile,
As if you had meant something quite different.
— from an abandoned version of his poem ‘Last Letter’