What a bleak, anticlimactic, eschatological PR caper that Birthday Letters charade made for. Ted has his last word in his last book. Ted made his last buck. As in a fable, he broke his silence, spoke his contestable truth, and then whistled his way out of the spotlight. He died offstage of a heart attack, hard upon his belated birthday tidings. The black cable extended across the Atlantic and culminated in the leaden ink of the morning paper. The telegram photoelectrically opened the door to unending public gossip sans slander suits. It cued yours truly and God knows how many other bibliophilic skulduggerers out there. With Ted gone, we can now muse behind his back and over his grave as well. Hearing hovering voices, as a matter of fact, cannot be anything so very new for either Sylvia or Ted. Nor can answering those voices, indistinctly or outright, if we, their readers and interpreters, can hope for a continuation of our long years of haunting. To be vexed, haunted, harassed, and obsessed by their convergent lives and mutually exclusive destinies is what we, their readers, we, their jury, we, their angels of ill intent, want more than a delineation of their collective tragic/romantic mystery. Rest assured. Though their bodies lie in what passes for peace now, concordances are being amassed. Prodigal poems are being called home to the anthologies. The last of their papers are being perused. In troubled times, their enmity and adversity will always provide us with a source of repose.

Notwithstanding jealousy, betrayal, marital separation, and their ultimate deaths, thirty-five long years apart, Ted and Sylvia have remained on tenuous, sometimes ireful, speaking terms all along. Many years before his birthday condolences, Ted wrote a volume concerning a transmutable crow who journeys to death and back. He wrote another book about the blood sacrifice of a changeling, seemingly in response to Sylvia’s poem about a trainee-suicide who sheds flesh like a striptease artist, taunting death itself. Sylvia seems to have left detailed instructions to posterity regarding the way in which she would like to be unremittingly psychoanalyzed in the echo chamber of Ted’s conscience and also in the dominion of Western literary studies. She was not only responsible for her own death; she selected the subterfuge of her burial site. She killed herself in pursuit of neither rest nor peace, nor even understanding, since recognition hardly ever equals understanding. For that matter, neither of the poets was interested in minting truth so much as in promulgating myth. Sylvia and Ted were mythologists with three primary thematic subjects: themselves, each other, and all the repercussions of their pairing—up to, including, and in the aftermath of the appearance of Assia Gutmann Wevill, the opaque lady of the sonnets. The divergent confessions of the two poets do indeed constitute a narrative much more than they constitute any sort of reckoning. In the last analysis, I think that it might be wiser to trust them less than their own critics and biographers. Their pattern of lies is my only paradigm, my one true fiction. I love Sylvia. I resent Ted. I owe neither of them anything.