A reading of a letter written by the poet Ted Hughes, to friend and critic Al Alvarez, in November of 1971. At this time, Alvarez was publishing an intimate (and to Hughes's mind, exploitative) account of the 1963 suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath. The letter can be found in The Letters of Ted Hughes, pages 321-326. 

I use this letter as a starting point to wonder why we treat celebrities, the famous, or just the infamous, the way we do; as Hughes puts it, knowledge of his and Sylvia Plath's marriage and private life can only be entertainment and anecdote, in this case for college teachers and their students; it can offer little insight into either writers' poetry. This intrusion into private lives and their grief, and the ease with which we, fifty years later, continue to lap up the gossip surrounding well-known people, should be an obvious parallel.

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