At the start of every new year, I lug a load of unwanted books to the charity shop, so that I can fill up the spaces on the shelves with new possibilities.

One book I won’t be letting go is THE LETTERS OF TED HUGHES, a strange and obsessive read, the kind of thing you want to keep forever, and there really aren’t that many of those.

I was relieved to read Hughes feeling the same way, when in a letter dated May 6th 1984, he says, ‘it was a strange experience moving my books. It made me realise how much I detest most of them. I discovered, for instance, that I have a deep hatred of all novels, except Singer, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. It isn’t that I’d burn the books. But at a certain point I would happily cease to go back into the flames.’

And yet, the reason for keeping Hughes, all of him, his poetry, his letters, is his gift for burning. He always went back into the flames, and never more spectacularly so as when at the end of his life he published BIRTHDAY LETTERS; those poems written privately to, for, about, I almost want to say with, his first wife Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963.

I can hardly believe that it is ten years this week since The Times published the first poems anyone had seen from the collection, which had been prepared for publication with the utmost secrecy – not as a publicity ploy, but to avoid the avid intrusions that Hughes had lived with for thirty-five years.

In the Times of January 17th 1998, Hughes explained the background to the poems, and his decision to break his self-imposed silence. BIRTHDAY LETTERS is a brave book, a beautiful book, and challenged in the only way possible the hysterical speculations, malign fury, and downright lies that had for so long smothered Plath the Poet inside Plath the Myth.

Ted Hughes’s last word on Sylvia Plath was a return to their shared beginnings – as poets together. That in itself was a statement. Our current obsession with autobiography of every kind is bad for art, for the simple reason that it encourages readers to choose the easier option – and the life of a writer/artist, however tormented and impossible, is always easier than grappling with the work.

Why? The work runs ahead, knowing the way, the writer/artist is sometimes left behind. We speculate on the drunkenness of Dylan Thomas, the addictions of Coleridge, the suicides of Woolf, of Plath, but the work remains, and if everything else were gone – every bit of gossip and scholarly research, what really would be lost? But if the poems, the plays, the novels were gone, and the life remained? What really would be gained?

Recurring in Hughes’s letters is a belief that Plath had conquered something important before her suicide, and that the suicide itself was a tragic accident, a fatality of timing. He looks not to the intimacies of their life for this conviction, but to her poems, certain that the posthumous collection ARIEL, marked a climb upwards, not a plunge down.

Hughes was a mystical, pattern-making poet, a man who like Yeats used a ouija board, and had a personal spirit called Pan. He was a keen astrologer, a Jungian, and a deep thinker who understood, to borrow from Julian of Norwich, that ‘by love a man may be kept, by thinking never.’

I often hear rational intelligent people discussing great figures, like Newton or Einstein, and indulgently dismissing what they think of their ‘eccentricities’, like Newton’s studies into astrology, or Einstein’s belief in God. Both Auden and Larkin found Yeats’s mysticism embarrassing, in the same way that Richard Dawkins was recently railing in the New Statesman about how ‘it is typical of the religious mind to force a gratuitous symbolic meaning where none was intended.’

I am on the side of meaning wherever it is found, but I know that enlightened rationality is only one kind of meaning – and not the symbolic kind that is often both healing and revelatory. I trust poets. I trust artists. I trust Newton and Einstein more than I trust Dawkins, not because they are ‘eccentric’, but because they apprehend that meaning has its coordinates in more than four dimensions.

Here’s Hughes, March 1994: ‘My view has always been that consciousness must be changed, if the true nature of reality, (as it is accessible to us) is to be grasped.’

That sounds to me like a worthwhile resolution for a new year.