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feel for the practical in the making of verses. He had constructed enough couplets of his own to see that the form, when used in a narrative, must
continually present the problem of the same pair of rhyme-sounds cropping up too early.
    English is so rhyme-poor that the same few pairs are always trying to get back in. Keeping them out is part of the ingenuity. Johnson knew that Pope could be wonderfully ingenious in loading and
balancing the interior of a line, or pair of lines, or even four of them. But Johnson was right to say that Pope was too often not diligent enough at reading back to see how long ago he had used
the same terminal sound as in the pair of rhymes he was currently putting together, and that the effect of inadvertent repetition undermined the intended air of inexhaustible virtuosity.
Johnson’s strictures on this point have the large implication that Pope was better in the brief passage than in the grand sweep, and any critic today who wants to write about the meaning of
the word ‘form’ when it comes to Pope could profitably start from where Johnson left off. (He might even find a hard-news reason for contending that the ‘Essay on Man’ is
badly argued: its author chose a bad form to argue in.) It would not have been impossible for a non-poet to have noticed what Johnson noticed about Pope, but it would have been far less likely.
    •
    Christopher Reid’s recently published selection of the letters of Ted Hughes shows that Hughes was well aware of how his wife Sylvia Plath, in her last phase, was working
miracles. I remember the time well. In London during the same cold winter of her death, I was reading over and over a batch of her poems in the
London Magazine
. One of them was
‘Cut’, the poem that bleeds from a sliced thumb. (Since 1965 it has been one of the most immediately thrilling things in her key book
Ariel
.) Without trying to, I memorized
several moments from that poem, most conspicuously the lines that start with the ‘Kamikaze man’. I was already wondering why Hughes himself was showing signs of no longer finding such
specific vividness desirable in his own poetry. I thought, and still think, that his early poems were his best, and that the very best was the one about the jaguar in the zoo, especially in its
last line, ‘Over the cage floor the horizons come.’ If he could do that once, why didn’t he do it again? (The admiring reader is always potentially censorious, because the
enjoyment is so childish: do it
again
.) And here was Plath, getting into that same wizardly area of concrete perception generating the purely poetic. For many years I prided myself on the
fact that I didn’t have to read the cut thumb poem to remember everything that went on in it.
    Recently I read the actual text again and found that I had remembered too much. I had remembered something that wasn’t there. In my memory, the kamikaze man had worn a ‘Gray gauze Ku
Klux Klan / Babushka’. But Plath never included the word ‘gray’. That word had leaked in from my own memory, where gauze tends to be gray because when I was very young I was
always cutting myself up somehow, getting the wounds bandaged, and wearing the bandages until they were dirty. The same sort of personal memory association has given Plath what amounts to the
punchline of the poem: its vocative penultimate line, a two-word sentence addressing the bloody wound: ‘Dirty girl.’ How brilliant, and how it tempts us to believe that this is the
atomic stuff of poetry, fit material for the catastrophic expansion of a career into a supernova of publicity.
    But what about all the poets since her death – and especially the women poets – who have delved into their traumas to dig up the same sort of stuff, and yet have produced poems more
boring than somebody telling you their dream? The answer is not just in what Plath said, but in the suave swing with which she said it. The lines about the kamikaze man, terrible in