I’ve been writing about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes for the last week and have been looking at a lot of books, photographs, and, of course, poems. Plath and Hughes, both handsome, were much photographed and by 1960 famous both individually and as a couple. That year, a photographer who’d made an appointment for a shoot with them at home arrived and it was clear to him that they’d been fighting. But the shoot went ahead and produced what is for me the most intriguing photograph I know of them. It doesn’t, perhaps, tell us much about poetry or genius or even Plath and Hughes’ individual lives, but it seizes upon a moment that we’ve all occupied or narrowly escaped.

They look like children or, at most, teenagers: He’s almost smirking, covering his knowledge that he’s in over his head, that he’s been caught out, shame-faced; she’s pouting, affronted, too stunned to quite cry again but the vastation’s breaking through. They have gone too far this time, they have gone somewhere from which they cannot return–not together.