Birthday Letters: Poems by Ted Hughes

From the Publisher

Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.

The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.

Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it is a truly remarkable collection of pems in its own right.

New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Most of the poems in Birthday Letters have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Mr. Hughes's writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief.

Jones

"By the time of her death on 11 February, 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry," writes Ted Hughes in the introduction to Plath's The Collected Poems . You'd never know from reading that sentence that Hughes was Plath's husband, the father of her children; there isn't an inkling of feeling in those words. This is the fashion in which Hughes has chosen to treat Plath since her suicide 30-plus years ago: as an academic subject, not as an emotional one.

Maybe that's what makes Hughes's Birthday Letters such an immediate pleasure. Public catharsis is so essential these days that it's broadcast on TV; much of the entire world watched for the proper people to weep during Princess Diana's funeral last year. After Plath's suicide, Hughes refused to give the public the catharsis it demanded, choosing instead to write his typically icy introductions to new editions of his wife's work. But these 88 poems are proof that Hughes did indeed endure a catharsis, albeit privately. Birthday Letters reveals that Hughes, who died last fall at the age of 68, was very much human after all.

Hughes was himself to blame for the cold portrait he presented to the public. He chose to live in seclusion. He did not grant interviews. He appointed his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as gate-keeper to himself and to Plath's works (Ted Hughes controlled every word of Plath's oeuvre). Olwyn's legendary temperament hasn't helped matters, earning her the reputation of a Cerberus set to harry the heels of potential Plath biographers. It is also well known that while Plath was home with her gas cooker, Hughes was off with his mistress. Hughes-bashers also like to point out that Hughes allowed The Bell Jar to be published posthumously in the U.S. because he needed money to buy a third house. Total up these actions and one begins to understand why the followers of St. Sylvia the martyr have tried to scratch the Hughes name from Plath's headstone in Yorkshire on three separate occasions.

Luckily, the public has an insatiable appetite not only for catharsis but also for redemption (just consider the resurgence of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and D.C. Mayor Marion Barry).

Hughes's reputation, for better or worse, is in the midst of being redeemed. In 1980 he was named Poet Laureate of England, a position he held until his death. After five biographies that have fingered Hughes as the bad guy, Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman strives mightily to restore Hughes to a position of honor. Malcolm goes so far as to compare Hughes to Prometheus, "whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily reravaged, Hughes [also] has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists." And now, with the surprise publication of Birthday Letters , Hughes's redemption is nearly complete.

The 88 free-verse poems of this collection trace the arc of Hughes and Plath's tempestuous relationship. The book begins with a poem inspired by a photograph that Hughes had seen in a newspaper in 1956 of that year's Fulbright scholars. Plath was among those pictured. Hughes realizes the enormous strength in small moments. He remembers a night during their courtship when, arriving at Plath's window late at night, he throws clods of dirt at the panes, trying to wake her ("Aiming to find you, and missing, and again missing"). On their marriage day, it is Plath's gown that Hughes remembers -- the pink wool knitted dress -- in the poem of the same title.

In Birthday Letters , Hughes seems to make an effort to remove every trace of poetic convention from his verse. The poems aren't preoccupied with rhyme and meter but are rough on the surface. "Maybe I noticed you," he writes of his young self looking at that photograph of Fulbright scholars. "Maybe I weighed you up." You can see from these lines that Hughes isn't interested in prosody so much as he is in keeping the voice credible and getting the details right.

Plath fans can also bear witness to Hughes's unique perspective on many of her infamous preoccupations, including her father ("Til your real target / Hid behind me. Your Daddy / The god with the smoking gun") and her private fears ("The dark ate at you. And the fear of being crushed. A huge machine").

Still, other poems ironically fulfill our expectations about Hughes. In "Fate Playing," Hughes tells a story about an incident where Plath had come to meet him at a bus station. When Hughes doesn't arrive on the designated bus (he has taken a train instead), Plath goes into a frenzy, scrambling across London, searching for him. Isn't this what the reader expected all along? A portrait of Plath going berserk, contrasted with a calm Hughes, sitting comfortably on a train, both on an inevitable collision course? And when Hughes writes, "There I knew what it was/To be a miracle," after his reunion with an overjoyed Plath, the reader thinks, "Oh no." Despite the powerful frankness of Birthday Letters , and despite the glimpse readers have been allowed into the private life of one of the most famous literary marriages in history, we cannot forget that it is still Hughes who is in complete control.

--Scott C. Jones

Publishers Weekly

Kept under tight wraps by the terms attached to a high-priced serialization in the London Times as well as by Hughes's notorious secrecy, the British Poet Laureate's collection of verse-letters to Sylvia Plath is already being heralded as one of the century's literary landmarks. The legend that has grown up around Plath, her poems, her life with Hughes and her suicide in 1963 has been tended by several generations of devoted scholars and readers, and made all the more insurmountable by Hughes's silence on anything relating to Plath other than her work. It is thus astonishing to have this near-narrative of the entire span of their relationship, from Hughes's first glimpse of Plath in a photo of arriving Fulbright scholars, to Hughes's anguish, until now an emotion not widely credited to him, since her death. At once the record of a Yorkshireman's collision with America and American-ness ("You stayed/ Alien to me as a window model,/ American, airport-hopping superproduct") and of a baffled husband's jealousy and despair at his wife's obsessive pursuit of her dead father, the poems arc through the poet's struggles — and joy — with the facts of his younger self's married life. Even tender recollections, such as Plath reciting Chaucer to a field of cows, are tinged with foreboding or, elsewhere, with the intensity of their writing lives: "The poems, like smoking entrails,/ Came soft into your hands." Throughout, Hughes's muscular, controlled free verse, familiar from his previous collections and recent Tales from Ovid, is well suited to the task of wrestling his memory of Plath back to earth, vividly rendering their past while allowing space for a present reckoning. Hughes's occasional snipes at the Plath faithful ("And now your peanut-crunchers can stare/ At the ink stains.../ Where you engraved your letters...") may lead some to accuse him of an elaborate attempt at revisionism, at remaking Plath in his own image. But the strength of the poems simply renders the charge moot, compelling us to accept this masterwork's sincerity, depth of feeling and force of language.

Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal

A distinguished poet, essayist, and translator who serves as poet laureate of England, Hughes is probably still best known as the husband of Sylvia Plath. Since her suicide in 1963, he has resolutely refused to speak about her, and he has been accused of abandoning her and driving her to her death. Now, for the first time, he discusses their relationshipmost appropriately in verse. Though he describes himself and Plath as "Siamese-twinned, each of us festering / a soul-sepsis for the other," this is not a book of wrenching revelations or vigorously mounted defense; it is, rather, a painful and painstaking exploration of just what went wrong in the poets' relationship 35 years ago. In his sometimes deceptively accessible verse, Hughes moves from initial encounterlike "the first fresh peach I ever tasted" through courtship, marriage, death, and regret ("Who will remember your fingers?/Their winged life"); throughout, these aptly named "letters" — written mostly in the second-person to Plath — are filled with foreboding. In the end, Hughes comes across as neither victimizer nor victim but as an ordinary human being too dazed — or too dense? — to recognize the lightning bolt that passed through his life. Essential for all literary collections.

Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal

A distinguished poet, essayist, and translator who serves as poet laureate of England, Hughes is probably still best known as the husband of Sylvia Plath. Since her suicide in 1963, he has resolutely refused to speak about her, and he has been accused of abandoning her and driving her to her death. Now, for the first time, he discusses their relationshipmost appropriately in verse. Though he describes himself and Plath as "Siamese-twinned, each of us festering / a soul-sepsis for the other," this is not a book of wrenching revelations or vigorously mounted defense; it is, rather, a painful and painstaking exploration of just what went wrong in the poets' relationship 35 years ago. In his sometimes deceptively accessible verse, Hughes moves from initial encounterlike "the first fresh peach I ever tasted" through courtship, marriage, death, and regret ("Who will remember your fingers?/Their winged life"); throughout, these aptly named "letters" — written mostly in the second-person to Plath — are filled with foreboding. In the end, Hughes comes across as neither victimizer nor victim but as an ordinary human being too dazed — or too dense? — to recognize the lightning bolt that passed through his life. Essential for all literary collections.

The New York Times Book Review - Katha Pollitt

[An] emotional direct, regretful, entranced [tone] pervades the book's strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and conversational.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

As anyone who has skimmed the voluminous press coverage knows, Birthday Letters is Hughes's account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which began as a love match between two gifted and ambitious young poets and ended with Plath's suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty, after Hughes had left her for another woman. The book thus makes up the untold portion of one of the great tragic love stories of our time, one so laden with myth and acrimony that at times it resembles a post-feminist Romeo and Juliet. Up until now we knew that story only as it had been related by Plath herself, in Ariel, the book of poems published after her death, and by her biographers and hagiographers. The latter have cast Plath as a literary saint and martyr, driven to kill herself by her husband's faithlessness and then silenced by his stringent control over her papers. Hughes's refusal to discuss his first wife publicly, or to assist the inquiries of most journalists and scholars, left this version of the Plath legend virtually unchallenged for three decades.

With Birthday Letters, Hughes does not so much dispel the myth as compose one of his own. "It is only a story," he writes. "Your story. My story" ("Visit"). Although he sometimes addresses his and Plath's children (to whom he also dedicates the book) and, in at least one instance, the more fanatical of Plath's champions, Hughes's story is aimed primarily to Sylvia Plath herself: Plath the poet, whose lines he often echoes and whose themes he reworks or resets as one resets a watch when traveling into another time zone; and Plath the woman he loved and to all appearances has not ceased loving thirty-six years after he left her. It is a complex love, an amalgam of passion, tenderness, respect, and awe, along with anger, frustration, pity, and despair, and its complexity makes Birthday Letters more convincing than any straightforward elegy would be. Among Hughes's signal accomplishments in this book is the way he compresses all the emotional anarchy of the conjugal bond into his account of his own marriage. He has endowed that account with a narrative momentum that has been largely absent from English-language poetry since the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot. And Hughes has conjured up Plath, his subject and antagonist, with an immediacy that makes us feel that he is addressing someone who has just walked out of the room -- and that he may still be waiting for her to answer him.

About the Marriage
When Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath at a party in Cambridge in 1956, she was a twenty-four-year-old Fulbright Scholar at Newnham College, a tense, lovely girl with long American legs and a small scar on her face. The tall, dourly handsome Hughes, Plath wrote, was "the only man I've met yet here who'd be strong enough to be equal with" (Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, p. 36). Their attraction was immediate and volcanic. Their first kiss ended with Plath biting Hughes on the cheek so hard that she drew blood. "The swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks," he writes in "St Botolph's," ". . . was to brand my face for the next month. The me beneath it for good" (p. 15).

Four months after their first meeting, Hughes and Plath were married. While she completed the second year of her Fulbright, he taught at a secondary school in Cambridge. The following year they moved to Boston, not far from where Plath had grown up and gone to college. Plath taught at Smith College and studied poetry with Robert Lowell. Hughes got a teaching job at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They traveled in the United States and Europe and in 1959 returned to England. In 1960 they had their first child, a girl named Frieda Rebecca. A son, Nicholas Farrer, was born in 1962.

Although Plath's first book of poems, The Colossus, was published in 1960, in those years Hughes was the public partner in their marriage. He wrote tirelessly, courting his muse with everything from astrology to Jungian psychology. Plath had not yet found the voice that would burst forth triumphantly and alarmingly in her last book, Ariel. She was haunted, groping, and unstable, bitterly obsessed by her father, a German-born entomologist who had died when she was eight. The scar that Hughes had so tenderly remarked was the souvenir of an earlier suicide attempt. Plath recorded that attempt and her ensuing confinement in a psychiatric hospital in The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel that was published in England in 1963, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

By then the marriage was over. In 1962 Hughes had left Plath for another poet, Assia Wevill. In February 1963 Plath killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven while her two children slept. She had sealed their bedroom against gas fumes and left milk and bread for them to find when they awoke (Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p. 7). In the years that followedb -- particularly after the posthumous publication of Ariel-Plath became a tragic icon for a generation of women, while Hughes was recast as the ogre in their fairy tale. Plath's advocates denounced Hughes as a murderer. (He had married Wevill, who killed herself and their daughter in 1969, employing the same method that Plath had used.) His readings were disrupted by angry demonstrators. Hughes's name has been repeatedly chipped off Plath's gravestone (Sarah Lyall, "A Divided Response to Hughes Poems," The New York Times, January 27, 1998).

Questions for discussion
1. Who is the "you" that the author addresses in these poems? Does the "you" ever change, and if so, in which poems? Are any of these poems addressed to "you," the reader?

2. Describe the person who is the subject and the object of these poems. What does she look like? How does she behave? How does the author feel about her? Are Hughes's descriptions and characterizations always consistent? Given the fact that he does not name his object, what persuades us that he is writing about one person?

3. What does Hughes accuse the "you" in these poems of doing? If you were the person addressed in Birthday Letters, how would you answer him?

4. The poems in Birthday Letters tell a story. Is it possible to reconstruct that story without re-sorting to what we know about the "real" Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? How might these poems strike a reader who knew nothing of their factual basis? Are we intended to read Hughes's narrative as an accurate record of events?

5. Just as Hughes composes a portrait of Birthday Letters's "you," he also gives us a sense of the "I" who is its narrator. What sort of character is he? Where is he sympathetic? What are his failings? Is the narrator the same person as the author?

6. Why are these poems presented in the order they are? Is their sequence strictly chronological? In what poems does the author foreshadow future events? Where does he flash back in time? Is it your sense that these poems appear in the order in which Hughes first wrote them or that he rearranged them to create a particular effect?

7. The poems in Birthday Letters belong to two types: straightforward narratives, like "St Botolph's" and "The Rabbit Catcher," and allegorical poems, like "The Minotaur" and "The Bee God." How do these styles differ? What are their respective strengths and weaknesses? Why might Hughes have chosen to tell his story in two different ways? Discuss other examples of these different poetic methods. 8. What story does Hughes tell in the poem "The Tender Place"? What is the significance of the scar he remarks in such poems as "St Botolph's," "18 Rugby Street," and "The Badlands"? In what other ways does he suggest that "you" (or, for the sake of simplicity, "Sylvia") was emotionally unstable? Is his evidence convincing?

9. At different points in Birthday Letters, Hughes compares Sylvia's madness to a machine ("The Machine"), a "womb-tumour" ("Moonwalk"), and an ominous "doppelgänger" in a painting ("Portraits"). Why might he have chosen to portray madness as something alien, an intrusion, rather than as an intrinsic part of Sylvia's character? What are the ramifications of this vision? What other symbols of intrusion, invasion, or possession occur in such poems as "Black Coat," "Remission," "The Afterbirth," and "The Table"? Who or what is the invader in "Dreamers"?

10. Among the many intruders in Birthday Letters is the specter of Sylvia's father. How does his presence (and absence) inform such poems as "The Shot," "Black Coat," "The Minotaur," "The Table," "The Bee God," "The Cast," and "A Picture of Otto"? What is his significance to Sylvia? To the narrator? In what ways does the narrator suggest that this figure is responsible for Sylvia's fate?

11. Hughes also describes Sylvia as wearing masks ("Moonwalk," "The Earthenware Head") and playing roles ("The Blue Flannel Suit," "Setebos"). In "The Hands," he compares her to a pair of gloves. What is the nature of these disguises and impostures? Does Sylvia adopt them deliberately? Do Sylvia's masks and roles conceal a "true" self, and if so, what is it? In which poems does the narrator himself adopt a false persona, or become possessed by an alien self?

12. Hughes makes recurrent references to Sylvia's Americanness ("Fulbright Scholars," "Your Paris," "Stubbing Wharfe"). What significance does he attach to this? How does he oppose this quality to his own Englishness? How do the poems set in America differ from those set in Europe?

13. Discuss the ways in which the poet uses animals ("Sam," "The Owl," "The Chipmunk," "9 Willow Street," "The 59th Bear," "Epiphany," "The Rabbit Catcher," "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother"). How does Hughes manage to convey their animality while also turning them into symbols? What do the different animals symbolize? Why, in "Your Paris," does Hughes describe himself as a dog?

14. What happens in the poem "Epiphany"? How does this incident become a test of the narrator's marriage, and how does the narrator fail it? In what other poems does Hughes employ the metaphor of a test?

15. The poems in Birthday Letters contain allusions to Donne ("18 Rugby Street"), Shakespeare ("A Pink Wool Knitted Dress," "Setebos,"), Chaucer ("St. Botolph's," "Chaucer"), and Emily Brontë ("Wuthering Heights"), and to the poems of Sylvia Plath ("The Rabbit Catcher," "The Bee God," "Night-Ride on Ariel"). What is the function of these allusions? How might reading The Tempest or Ariel deepen your understanding of this book? In what ways is the entire book a response to the writing of Sylvia Plath? Does the use of literary allusions heighten or lessen the emotional impact of these poems? 16. Discuss the role of oracles and portents in such poems as "St Botolph's," "Ouija," "Horoscope," "Grand Canyon," "Fairy Tale," and "Life after Death." Do these portents merely foreshadow events in the narrative, or do they serve another purpose? By evoking fate so dramatically -- and even luridly -- is the poet suggesting that what happened to Sylvia was unavoidable? Based on the evidence in these poems, do you agree?

For Further Reading
A. Alvarez, The Savage God (nonfiction); John Berryman, The Dream Songs; Robert Browning, Men and Women, Dramatis Personae, The Ring and the Book; T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land; Robert Graves, The White Goddess (nonfiction); Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Art and the Collective Unconscious (psychology); Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (nonfiction); Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Moortown Diary, and Tales from Ovid, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose; Sylvia Plath, The Colossus, Ariel, The Bell Jar, Journals of Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963.

About Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire, England, the youngest of three children. He grew up in the Yorkshire countryside, whose landscape and wildlife inform much of his poetry. In 1948 he was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in 1954 with a degree in English and anthropology. Over the next two years he wrote poems while working as a nightwatchman, a rose gardener, and an employee of the J. Arthur Rank film company.

In 1957 Hughes's first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, won the First Publication Award in New York, judged by Stephen Spender, Marianne Moore, and W. H. Auden. A second collection, Lupercal, appeared in 1960 and was given the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. Hughes went on to write more than forty books: poetry, including Wodwo, Crow, Moortown Diary, New Selected Poems 1957-1994 and Birthday Letters, his account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath; translation, including Seneca's Oedipus, Lorca's Blood Wedding, and Tales from Ovid, winner of the 1997 Whitbread Prize; and prose works such as Poetry in the Making, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Winter Pollen, and Difficulties of a Bridegroom. Hughes, who lived in Devon, England, was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1977, was named Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II in 1984, and received the Order of Merit shortly before his death in October 1998. He left two finished works unpublished in the United States-translations of Racine's Phèdre (published in January 1999) and of Aeschylus's Oresteia (June 1999).
*Information from The Times (London), January 17, 1998, p. 19, and The New York Times, October 30, 1998

Read an Excerpt

As anyone who has skimmed the voluminous press coverage already knows, Birthday Letters is Hughes’s account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which began as a love match between two gifted and ambitious young poets and ended with Plath’s suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty, after Hughes had left her for another woman. The book thus makes up the untold portion of one of the great tragic love stories of our time, one so laden with myth and acrimony that at times it resembles a post-feminist Romeo and Juliet. Up until now we knew that story only as it had been related by Plath herself, in Ariel, the book of poems published after her death, and by her biographers and hagiographers. The latter have cast Plath as a literary saint and martyr, driven to kill herself by her husband’s faithlessness and then silenced by his stringent control over her papers. Hughes’s refusal to discuss his first wife publicly, or to assist the inquiries of most journalists and scholars, has left this version of the Plath legend virtually unchallenged.

With Birthday Letters, Hughes does not so much dispel the myth as compose one of his own. "It is only a story," he writes. "Your story. My story" ("Visit"). Although he sometimes addresses his and Plath’s children (to whom he also dedicates the book) and, in at least one instance, the more fanatical of Plath’s champions, Hughes’s story is aimed primarily to Sylvia Plath herself: Plath the poet, whose lines he often echoes and whose themes he reworks or resets as one resets a watch when traveling into another time zone; and Plath the woman he loved and to all appearances has not ceased loving thirty-six years after he left her. It is a complex love, an amalgam of passion, tenderness, respect, and awe, along with anger, frustration, pity, and despair, and its complexity makes Birthday Letters more convincing than any straightforward elegy would be. Among Hughes’s signal accomplishments in this book is the way he compresses all the emotional anarchy of the conjugal bond into his account of his own marriage. He has endowed that account with a narrative momentum that has been largely absent from English-language poetry since the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot. And Hughes has conjured up Plath, his subject and antagonist, with an immediacy that makes us feel that he is addressing someone who has just walked out of the room-and that he may still be waiting for her to answer him.

Read a Sample Chapter

A Short Film

It was not meant to hurt.
It had been made for happy remembering
By people who were still too young
To have learned about memory.

Now it is a dangerous weapon, a time-bomb.
Which is a kind of body-bomb, long-term, too.
Only film, a few frames of you skipping, a few seconds.
You aged about ten there, skipping and still skipping.

Not very clear grey, made out of mist and smudge.
This thing has a fine fuse, less a fuse
Than a wavelength attuned, an electronic detonator
To what lies in your grave inside us.

And how that explosion would hurt
Is not just an idea of horror but a flash of fine sweat
Over the skin-surface, a bracing of nerves
For something that has already happened.