To Burn or Not to Burn: The Heir’s Ultimate Dilemma

Plath & Sexton

Kafka Aspern PapersThis profoundly unenviable dilemma has been faced by the friends and family of Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, perhaps apocryphally, Virgil. When an heir succumbs to the temptation to burn something—as Ted Hughes did with some of Sylvia Plath’s papers, on the not unreasonable grounds that there were things there he did not want her children to read—the burner is inevitably excoriated. It is a subject that gets people, and the literary imagination, going, from Henry James in The Aspern Papers to Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil (a strong candidate for least readable alleged masterpiece in the European canon). >>>

from “Flashes of Flora” by John Lanchester, New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009.

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Author: The Best American Poetry