Poetic justice?

You could say that the poet Ted Hughes helped guarantee his own bad press -- and not just by abandoning his wife, Sylvia Plath, for another woman.

The 30-year-old Plath killed herself in 1963, leaving in Hughes’ care two young children, poems of radiant despair and a life story easily transmogrified into myth. As her literary executor, Hughes helped fuel the myth. But he also confessed censorship, burning her last journal and removing some poems critical of him from her posthumous collection, “Ariel,” which, as she had predicted, made her name.

For decades, even as many of Plath’s myriad biographers cast him as a philandering villain, the British poet laureate largely remained mostly silent about his seven-year marriage to Plath.

Then, in 1998, shortly before his death, Hughes published “Birthday Letters” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A passionate, self-justifying paean to their relationship, the book showed, if nothing else, that he had never stopped thinking about her. Along with the opening of his papers at Atlanta’s Emory University in 2000, it has helped inspire a more nuanced portrait of the man famously condemned by Plath in “Daddy” as a Nazi brute.

The two latest arguments for a (somewhat) kinder, gentler Hughes are the movie “Sylvia,” which opened Friday and stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath, and the book “Her Husband: Hughes and Plath -- Portrait of a Marriage” by Diane Middlebrook, published this month by Viking.

On another front, the November release of Hughes’ “Collected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is likely to enhance his literary reputation in this country, where his work has been available only erratically. Paul Keegan, its editor, says he hopes the collection will show the range of Hughes’ poetic achievement and help redress “the baleful influence his life has had on perceptions of his work.”

Middlebrook’s book, a hybrid biography and literary study, calls the Plath-Hughes alliance “the most mutually productive literary marriage of the 20th century.” Plath exerted “a gravitational pull” on Hughes’ imagination, the biographer says.

In an interview, Middlebrook says she found Hughes “a considerably more interesting person, and also more cooperative, than he was thought to be.” Instead of condemning him because both Plath and the woman he left her for, Assia Wevill, ended up killing themselves, “you might feel sympathy for him,” Middlebrook suggests. “Here’s a man who has been through hell.”

There is no mention of Wevill’s copycat suicide in the epilogue of “Sylvia.” And as played by British actor Daniel Craig, “Sylvia’s” Hughes, with his dark good lucks and resonant voice, is no murderous Bluebeard -- just a man caught in a situation beyond his control. Screenwriter John Brownlow and director Christine Jeffs (“Rain”) paint the Hughes-Plath union as a tragic love story worthy of Romeo and Juliet, whom the film couple quote.

“Sylvia” producer Alison Owen says the movie tells “the ultimate ‘can’t live with you, can’t live without you’ love story.” Their marriage was “much more committed and balanced ... than any of the biographies seemed to suggest,” says Brownlow, who relied on original research, as well as their poetry. “Neither of them could be blamed for the breakdown of the relationship any more than they could be ‘blamed’ for embarking upon it in the first place.”

Hughes’ attraction

Not that Hughes-blaming is a dying art.

“Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath” (St. Martin’s Press), a recent memoir by her friend Jillian Becker, describes Plath’s anguish at Hughes’ adultery. After the suicide, Becker says the grieving Hughes was “self-absorbed” and “hostile” and remembers him saying: “It was either her or me.”

Paul Alexander, author of the anti-Hughes “Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath” (Viking, 1991), launches another fusillade in “Edge,” a one-woman show set on the last day of Plath’s life. Starring Angelica Torn in a searing performance, the show closed its limited off-Broadway run last month and will open in London in January.

Alexander says he understands why Plath responded to Hughes. “Ted Hughes,” he says, “was absolutely the most fascinating man I ever met in my life. He was dark, demonic, sexual, fascinating, intelligent all at the same time -- a true giant of a man. I saw what Sylvia saw in him. He dominated a room. He was a unique demonic presence. Who’s not attracted to that?”

Edge underscores the relationship’s sadomasochism and faults Hughes for Plath’s death. “She picked Ted because he was a violent person, because he liked to kill things,” Alexander says. “She was looking for a man who would destroy her, and she found him.”

Alexander’s views hark back to the 1970s, when demonizing Hughes was a flourishing industry, when the poet faced angry protests at his readings and Plath’s married name was routinely defaced on her tombstone.

Anne Stevenson’s controversial biography, “Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath” (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), suggested that Plath’s emotional problems helped drive Hughes away. Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography, “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), also expressed compassion for Hughes.

But it was “Birthday Letters” that really turned the tide. “I saw my world again through your eyes,” Hughes writes in “The Owl.” Throughout the collection, he summons images of their life together and seeks solace in myth, metaphor and a sense that Plath’s death was fated.

“Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001) by Elaine Feinstein, a poet who knew him, calls Hughes “a man whose life, if far from conventionally blameless, was always lived with warmth and generosity.” She says “Birthday Letters” helped promote “a new understanding of how strongly Plath and Hughes were shaped by their passionate love and the damage they did to one another nevertheless.”

In an e-mail interview from London, Feinstein concedes that “his adultery was very hurtful to Plath.” But she adds: “He treated her kindly through most of their marriage, notably changing nappies [diapers] and allowing fixed hours for her to get on with her own work, which was unusual in those days.... Not everyone believed what Hughes wrote in ‘Birthday Letters,’ but most of it is backed up by the archive at Emory.”

Middlebrook’s book draws on both the poetry and the archive. Among its revelations are love letters Hughes wrote early on, showing that he was as smitten as she was. Correspondence with his beloved older brother, Gerald, shows yet another side of Hughes. Middlebrook speculates that a box in the archive, sealed until 2023, may contain a missing Plath journal that Hughes suggested was lost.

Middlebrook is tolerant of Hughes’ extramarital pursuits, which continued during his marriage to Carol Orchard. “He was pretty clearly a man who needed more than one woman, like many artists,” she says.

“Sylvia” is more ambiguous on that score. Told through Plath’s eyes, the film leaves open the question of whether he strayed before meeting Assia.

Owen, who originated the project, says the bleak subject matter made it hard to secure financing, and the project was hampered by the Hughes estate’s refusal to grant permission to use the poetry. Nevertheless, thanks to the “fair use” doctrine, the movie is able to open with some of Plath’s most famous lines, from “Lady Lazarus,” about her predilection for suicide. Together with Gabriel Yared’s lush romantic score, they underline the notion of a tragic doomed love.

“One way of looking at Sylvia’s almost psychopathic fear of losing Ted is that she knew herself well enough to realize that without Ted, death by suicide would again become a likely fate,” Brownlow says. Plath lost her father when she was 8, an event that shadowed her life and work, and she describes her first suicide attempt in her novel “The Bell Jar.”

To Brownlow, the tragedy is that “Sylvia’s fear of losing Ted was part of the reason he looked elsewhere, while the burden of fidelity which he willingly shouldered was one he must have known he was not strong enough to carry.”

Middlebrook writes that “depression killed Sylvia Plath.” Brownlow’s more complex view is that Plath’s decision to end her life was conditioned by “the terrible weather, her isolation, prescribed drugs possibly, depression, her own fear of becoming mad, sleep loss, anger, and behind it all the figure of her father beckoning on the other side of the mirror.”

Paltrow’s agonized Plath is at once seductress and victim. But is it fair to characterize Craig’s Hughes as a kinder, gentler figure than the old stereotype of the demon-lover?

“ ‘Kind’ and ‘gentle’ are not words which crop up much in conversation with people who knew Ted Hughes, although I know people to whom he was very kind, and there are occasional moments of great gentleness in his writing,” Brownlow says. “If we are seeing a revision of the reputation of Ted Hughes, it is only because he was caricatured so badly in the past.”