Birthday Letters

Throughout his forty-year career, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work had mythic scope and power, and few episodes in postwar literature have the mythic stature of his romance with the great poet Sylvia Plath, from their legendary first meeting in 1956 until her suicide in 1963. Birthday Letters, his account in poetry of their life together, was one of the most talked-about books of 1998, and its sudden appearance was a momentous event in the poetry world. Most of these eighty-eight poems are written loosely in the form of “letters” from Hughes to Plath. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations after the fact. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath’s time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his own poetry-animal, vegetable, mythological-and on Plath’s famous poetry as well. Hughes depicts Plath as a sort of a goddess who needed to die and rise again, and her father as a god of death; she needed to die to be reunited with him. The book is a record of an unbearably intense romance-and a remarkable volume of poetry in its own right.