On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, in the alleyway behind 23 Fitzroy Road in snowbound London, Myra Norris, a Health Services nurse who was scheduled to arrive for work at 9 a.m. but couldn't get anyone to answer, looked up at the flat where she was supposed to be and saw them-two small children framed by a window, crying. Rushing around to the main street, the nurse persuaded a construction worker to break down the brownstone's front door. In the kitchen of the upstairs flat, they discovered the body of a woman sprawled on the floor, her head in the oven, the gas still on. One floor up, they found her children sealed in their bedroom. In another room, on the desk where she worked, lay an unpublished manuscript entitled Ariel and Other Poems.

The dead woman was Sylvia Plath. Only 30 when she died, she'd lived a full life: She'd earned degrees from Smith College and Cambridge University; published one poetry collection under her own name (The Colossus) and one novel under a pseudonym (The Bell Jar); survived three suicide attempts (one of them serious); given birth to two children; and endured a seven-year marriage to the young British poet Ted Hughes. In July of 1962, that marriage had begun to unravel when Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with their friend, Assia Guttman, who was married to the poet David Wevill. Had it not been for the affair, Plath's marriage would certainly have continued-at least as far as Plath was concerned.

But as the summer and fall unfolded, Hughes unleashed a flurry of emotional abuse on Plath, who more than once wrote her mother that Hughes was trying to "kill" her with his actions. That's one reason why many people sympathetic to Plath were unhappy when Hughes inherited her entire literary estate, including unpublished work like Ariel. It seemed bitterly ironic that the man responsible for Plath's final deadly breakdown (there had been other breakdowns, to be sure, which Hughes knew about when he met her) would now own the copyright to all of her work.

In 1965, Hughes decided to publish Ariel in the United Kingdom, but when he did, he drastically altered the 40-poem manuscript Plath had completed and carefully arranged as of mid-November 1962. (The book, Plath noted, began with the word "Love" and ended with the word "Spring.") Hughes omitted 13 poems, among them "The Rabbit Catcher" (a poem about a strained romance in which the woman feels she is being killed by the relationship), "Barren Women" and "Lesbos" (unhappy poems directed toward Hughes' sister, Olwyn), "A Secret" (a vicious poem spoken by a woman who wants the man in her life "dead or away"), "The Other" (a poem in which the narrator's rival is another woman) and "Stopped Dead" (an unflattering poem about Hughes' uncle, Walter).

Generally speaking, Hughes removed poems that were personally aggressive toward him or his family. He replaced them with poems that were either emotionally neutral (like "Balloons" or "Years") or potentially cast Plath in a bad light (like "Kindness" or "Edge"). Some but not all of the poems Hughes added came from poems Plath had written in the final weeks of her life. When Ariel appeared in America in 1966, Hughes-rather inexplicably-added "Lesbos," "Mary's Song" and "The Swarm."

Hughes significantly altered Plath's original vision of the volume and removed as many poems as possible that were offensive to him. Despite his actions, and because of an extraordinary core group of poems ("Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "The Applicant," "Cut," "Elm," "Ariel," "Fever 103Þ"-poems Hughes could not remove because they had been either published or accepted for publication), Ariel would go on to become one of the seminal volumes of poetry published in the 20th century, and Plath would take her place in the canon of American literature as one of the masters-arguably the most important woman poet since Emily Dickinson.

Now, almost four decades after its publication, Ariel has been re-released, presented exactly as Plath intended. The original Ariel has been available for years in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, so it's hardly new to Plath scholars. What's new is the introduction by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who was not yet 3 when her mother died. Obviously, anyone familiar with Plath's life and work will have enormous sympathy for Frieda and her brother, Nicholas. The image of those two children framed by the window that February morning is haunting, the pathos nearly overwhelming.

However, in Frieda Hughes' introduction, there's information presented as fact that is, at best, open to interpretation-at worst, it's simply wrong. This is how Ms. Hughes describes the events that led to her parents' separation: "On work-connected visits to London in June 1962, my father began an affair with a woman who had incurred my mother's jealousy a month earlier. My mother, somehow learning of the affair, was enraged. In July her mother, Aurelia, came to stay at Court Green, our thatched black and white cob house in Devon, for a long visit …. By early October, with encouragement from Aurelia (whose efforts I witnessed as a small child), my mother ordered my father out of the house."

First, Hughes' decision to embark on an affair with Guttman had nothing to do with Plath's reported jealousy. (Strangely, earlier boyfriends of Plath had never complained about her being jealous.) In fact, Plath probably sensed Guttman had designs on her husband, which-quite understandably, actually-sparked Plath's concern. Second, Plath learned of the affair because Guttman kept calling Court Green and, on one particular day when Plath unexpectedly answered the phone instead of Hughes, actually disguised her voice as a man's (as if Plath would not recognize Guttman, a close friend!) and asked to speak to Hughes. Plath captured the whole disturbing incident in "Words heard, by accident, over the phone"-an episode seemingly orchestrated by Guttman to reveal her affair with Hughes to Plath. Finally, Plath's decision to end the marriage had nothing to do with her mother, whose advice, at this point in her life, she routinely ignored.

Later in her introduction, Ms. Hughes writes: "My father continued to see 'the other woman' … but she remained living primarily with her husband for two and a half years after my mother's death." What Ms. Hughes does not say is that, even though she never divorced Wevill, Guttman and Hughes continued their affair for a total of seven years and had a daughter together, Shura. Their affair finally ended when Guttman killed both herself and Shura in the same way Plath had-by turning on the gas in the kitchen stove. It's said that Guttman killed herself beside a trunk of Plath's unpublished manuscripts.

It's understandable that Frieda Hughes-about 10 at the time of Guttman's and her half-sister's deaths-might be sensitive about this material, but leaving out certain information clouds the picture of the Plath-Hughes saga. Consider this detail: "It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak … and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father's work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it." What Ms. Hughes doesn't mention is that in the second episode, when Plath built a bonfire in the backyard at Court Green and burned a lot of documents after learning of her husband's affair, she also destroyed her own work, specifically a sequel she had written to The Bell Jar in which the heroine's emotional distress is healed by her finding a supporting and loving man-now obviously a painful literary conceit for Plath since her marriage was falling apart. Nor does Ms. Hughes mention that in the years following Plath's death, Hughes allowed one large notebook containing her final journals to go "missing" and destroyed a second one because, as Hughes would later say, he did not want his children to read what Plath had written about him.

Simply put, Ms. Hughes has produced an introduction to the new Ariel that continues the disparagement of Plath and the defense of Hughes that Hughes, his family and friends have carried on now for over 40 years. Plath may have been difficult, but Hughes' roguish and flagrantly uncaring behavior in the final eight months of Plath's life was not and is not defensible. His actions helped silence prematurely one of the great geniuses of American literature.

The introduction to a restored Ariel is not the place for Plath's daughter to defend her father and attack her mother. Better to celebrate what is now more obvious than ever: Made up of poems that are so original in their style and so startlingly accomplished in their confessional voice that they helped change the direction of contemporary poetry, Ariel is a masterpiece.

Paul Alexander is the author of Rough Magic (DaCapo), a biography of Sylvia Plath, and Edge, a one-woman play about her.

Over the years, Mr. Hughes has kept quiet about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. Now, 35 years after her death, he has finally broken that silence with Birthday Letters , a volume of 88 poems, all but two of which are addressed to her. Rarely has a book of poetry received such hype, meriting front-page articles in both The New York Times and The Times of London. Indeed, the press coverage has been so intense that Birthday Letters has landed on several best seller lists, one of the few times in recent memory a volume of poetry has done so.

After such a long silence, many readers have been looking anxiously to Birthday Letters for Mr. Hughes' commentary on Plath. They will be disappointed, however, for the book provides little new information. Readers will learn that the couple met at Cambridge University, dated briefly, married, honeymooned in Paris, vacationed in Spain, traveled across America and ended up in England to live. But all of this has been covered in much more detail in the biographies of Plath that have appeared through the years. (Full disclosure: I come to this conclusion having written one of those biographies myself.)

In fact, what many readers-not to mention the literary community-have been waiting for for 35 years now is some admission from Mr. Hughes about the role he played in Sylvia Plath's suicide or, failing that, some insight into why she did what she did. After all, of all the figures in Plath's life, the one who should know what was happening to her in those early weeks of 1963 is Mr. Hughes. Instead of providing an explanation of the events that lead up to her suicide, however, Mr. Hughes offers only one reason as to why their marriage broke up, the singular event that precipitated Plath's final emotional decline.

According to Mr. Hughes, Plath was disturbed because of painful memories of her father. Anything could trigger these memories. When Mr. Hughes made her a desk, the wood reminded Plath of her "daddy." "With a plane/ I revealed a perfect landing pad/ For your inspiration," he writes in "The Table." "I did not/ Know I had made and fitted a door/ Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave." As these memories took over, Plath apparently projected her disturbed emotions onto Mr. Hughes. "You were the jailer of your murderer-/ Which imprisoned you," he writes in "The Blackbird." "And since I was your nurse and protector/ Your sentence was mine too." To help her cope with her feelings, Mr. Hughes, his wife's "protector," hypnotized her ("Each night/ I hypnotized calm into you"). Ultimately, it did no good. Mr. Hughes could not control her, Plath could not control her emotions, and he moved on. Or at least that's the version of events he offers in Birthday Letters .

So that's it? Readers have waited three and a half decades to hear Ted Hughes make the earth-shaking revelation that he left Sylvia Plath because she was disturbed by upsetting memories of her dead father? What an anticlimax! Then again, Mr. Hughes has lived much of his life in denial, which is evident in Birthday Letters . Except for one veiled reference that is so convoluted most readers will not understand it, Mr. Hughes never discusses the reality: that he did not leave Plath to be alone, to get away from her craziness, as he would have readers believe, but to be with Assia Gutmann. Much of this is made evident in the correspondence Plath carried on with her mother in the last months of her life. (These letters are part of Plath's literary papers housed at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.)

"I found Ted has been building a secret London life all this summer-a flat, a separate bank account, this woman, who I am sure will now leave her … husband & marry Ted," Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia Plath, on Oct. 9, 1962, referring to Mr. Hughes' affair with Assia. "He gave me no time, no inkling, to make any plans of my own."

In Birthday Letters , Mr. Hughes never mentions Plath's fear of him. "He is not only infantile," Plath wrote to her mother on Sept. 24, 1962, "but dangerously destructive, and I feel both the children & I need protection from him, for now & forever." At no point in Birthday Letters does Mr. Hughes discuss the contempt he and Assia quickly developed for Plath. That abhorrence apparently became so strong that they taunted Plath, a woman known to them to have a history of suicide attempts, to kill herself. "Ted and his woman … have already wistfully started wondering why I didn't commit suicide, since I did before!" Plath wrote to her mother on Oct. 16, 1962. "Ted has said how convenient it would be if I were dead, then he could sell the house & take the children whom He likes. It is me he does not like." (Not surprisingly, the quotes from Plath's letters included here were edited out of Letters Home , a collection of Plath's letters to her mother; Mr. Hughes had final editorial control over that book.)

This disdain did not end with Plath's suicide. Several weeks after her death, Assia Gutmann sent the final gas bill for Plath's flat to one of Plath's best friends with a note that read, "You were her friend. You pay the bill."

None of these extreme emotions is even alluded to in Birthday Letters . Instead, readers get homogenized fragments of Mr. Hughes' memories of his life with Plath-a car trip here, a daffodil-picking expedition there-in poems that are advertised as having been written over a 25-year period but are so similar in tone, and so comparable in construction, they feel as if they were written in one sustained burst of energy. Ironically, the poems themselves exhibit no energy at all, which ultimately underscores the tragedy of Plath's death and the travesty of Mr. Hughes' failure to explain his connection to it. With Birthday Letters , Mr. Hughes proves once and for all that Plath was the greater poet; only with Crow did he approach writing pieces of literature that will last. Finally, this current spree of media hype cannot obscure the fact that, even after publishing a book about her, Mr. Hughes has said nothing relevant about his former wife, her death or the loss to literature her death represents.