[on his relationship with
Sylvia Plath] My listening to her poems and encouraging her did nothing to alleviate her terrible loneliness and despair. She also needed someone to take care of her and that was not a role I could fill. I loved Sylvia in the way I love other friends - for her intelligence, her liveliness and the pleasure of her company, and for the disinterested passion for poetry which we shared. But my own life was a mess back then and I was neither willing nor tough enough to shoulder her despair. In the end, like everyone else, I let her down. All I can plead in my defence is that, since her death, I have done my best to show that what she wrote matters a great deal more than how she died.