Birthday Letters

by Ted Hughes

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374525811
• ISBN13: 9780374525811
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

My first introduction to Ted

I must admit I felt a dislike of Ted before embarking on this book, from reading a bunch of Slyvia's work which I revere highly. I was also very skeptical of watching the film with Gwenyth Paltrow, which impressed me as it seemed like a good representation of them and very well acted. The movie actually made things more clear to me and they must have taken from his book Birthday Letters to write the script because certain scenes in the film are some of his poems. This book is very moving and I started to sob about 4 poems into it. Definately a book to read on a cold rainy day!

It presents snapshots frozen in time.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is the author of more than forty books of poems, prose, and translation. He has received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and now the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, what first brought him into the limelight was the death of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath - an incident that sent shock waves through literary circles in1963 and had all the radical feminists up in arms against the man who had allegedly driven his wife to a self-inflicted death. Ever since, Hughes has been at the centre of controversies. Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children's verse. At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath's poems, letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, not surprisingly, he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe which are forever threatening man. He did not write of personal experiences. He did not write of his wife's suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow - masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through. Meanwhile the Plath myth has grown. It has all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in self-destructive violence. The present volume of poems, Birthday Letters, is very different from the earlier collections. Whereas earlier Hughes liked to assume the role of a sort of wild man of the woods surrounded by his animals and birds, here we have Ted Hughes the man, the husband and the lover, without his mask. These are poems, personal and intimate, addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of thirty-five years following her death. In order to appreciate the poems of Birthday Letters fully the reader needs to be familiar with the life and work of Sylvia Plath. There are at least three crucial biographical facts that cast their shadow on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight; two, the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, in whom she saw a father surrogate; and, three, her suicide attempts, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one, and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these major events of Plath's life is based her major poetry, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of. And these are the events referred to repeatedly in the new poems of Ted Hughes. Birthday Poems may thus be considered a companion piece to Sylvia Plath's poetry, offering another understanding of it by filling in the background to poems, to the early days of their courtship and the growing inten