Birthday Letters
by Ted Hughes
Summary
Birthday Letters is the most famous book of poems published in Britain in the last half century, and its story is inseparable from its content: after thirty five years of near total public silence about Sylvia Plath, his first wife, whose suicide in 1963 had made him the most scrutinized widower in literature, Ted Hughes published eighty eight poems addressed directly to her, and died nine months later. The book had been written in secret across a quarter century. It begins with Fulbright Scholars, Hughes trying to recall whether he first saw Plath in a photograph of that year's American arrivals, and proceeds through the whole shared life, Cambridge, the marriage, America and the Smith College classroom of The Blue Flannel Suit, Devon, the children, the breakage, and the long afterward, each poem replaying a scene with the helpless precision of a man who has never stopped running the film. Some poems answer Plath's own, taking up her titles and images from the other side. The tone astonished everyone: Michiko Kakutani noted how free the book is of self pity, score settling, and spin, and its Hughes is not the defendant his enemies expected but a man arguing with fate, reading the marriage as a story whose ending was written into it from the start, a reading itself much argued with. The public response had no precedent for poetry, weeks on the bestseller lists, and the prizes followed in a sweep: the Forward Prize while he was still alive, then, weeks after his death, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Historical Context & Significance
Hughes had spent three decades as the villain of a literary cult, Plath's grave defaced, his readings picketed, and Birthday Letters, appearing in January 1998, reversed the whole weather in a week; he was dying of cancer as it happened, which the public did not know, and the prizes of 1998, arriving around his death in October, became a farewell. The book reopened every Plath argument it touched, with feminist critics contesting its version of the marriage, and scholarship has mined it ever since, alongside the letters and journals published later. As Poet Laureate, nature poet, and children's author Hughes had many monuments already; this one changed how all of them are read, and every Plath and Hughes biography since has been written in its light.