Ted hughes endorses sylvia plath biography poems

Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber, )

Helen Melody (Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library) introduces Hughes's remarkable sequence of poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath. 

Birthday Letters, Hughes’ penultimate poetry collection, was published to both public and critical acclaim in , with Hughes winning accolades for the collection that included the Whitbread Book of the Year and the T.S.

Eliot Prize for Poetry. Although Hughes had previously published a small number of poems about his first wife, Sylvia Plath, and Assia Wevill in Capriccio () and in New Selected Poems (), Birthday Letters was the first time he had addressed the subject of his troubled first marriage directly.

There was a huge amount of interest in the publication, which came after decades of comment and speculation about the couple’s relationship.

In the eighty-eight poems which make up Birthday Letters, the poet explores his