Sylvia Plath Sir: Peter Ackroyd thinks Sylvia Plath has been
over-rated and I expect he is right, but why must he assume that a girl in her twenties who writes to her mother 'VERY GOOD NEWS: in the mail I just got my first acceptance from the New Yorker' is thereby to be dismissed with 'It has to be said: only a minor poet could write that sentence'? Should not someone protest on humanitarian grounds against this ineluctably blasé approach ?
\It is far too commonly assumed (especially among publishers) that the more serious a writer is about his work the less he cares whether anyone reads it or not.
Sylvia Plath's desire for approval may have been neurotic, but any young writer is likely to want some sort of recognition. Where should he seek it if the Sundays, the weeklies and the BBC are as much to be despised as Mr Ackroyd implies? Is the private commendation of a clique going to be better for his talent ?
If all young writers were as sophisticated, as.knowing about the literary world, as Mr Ackroyd seems to require them to be, they'd be very unlikely to do anything so naïve as, for instance, to write a first novel. They'd have to be critics, every one of them.
Isabel Colegate Midford Castle, Bath
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