Her husband. That is how the late poet Ted Hughes is best known today. Not as ‘s former poet laureate or as the author of such estimable collections as “Lupercal” or “Crow,” but as Sylvia Plath’s husband, whose infidelity helped spur her to grief and suicide, as the man who presided over her literary estate and shaped her fame, as the man who played Ferdinand to her Miranda, Leonard to her Virginia. (Kakutani E9)
This paragraph, written by Michiko Kakutani, sums up the essential idea that surrounds Ted Hughes. He is only known as Sylvia Plath’s husband because her fame overwhelms any literary achievements he himself might have received. Plath’s “posthumous fame threatened to completely overshadow his own career” (Lyall). In his obituary, Ra Page writes that:
Hughes will be honoured as many things: as a translator, a children’s writer, a revitalising critic of Shakespeare and a champion of modern Eastern European poetry. But it is as a poet of the original order, as a cultural shaman who helped heal English verse, that he ought most to be remembered. (55)
Hughes was the only writer to win the Whitbread Book of the Year twice in its history (Richardson 17). He was made ‘s Poet Laureate in 1984 and “was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Birthday Letters” (Lyall).
Lynda Bundtzen writes that The Birthday Letters “has received very little interpretation based primarily on its literary values” (457). The Birthday Letters consists of a collection of 88 poems, published 35 years after his wife’s suicide. The poems are written “in an unfettered form of free verse. Their tone and content are at the same time expansive, emotional, vulnerable, dignified, and pained” (Sen 621). Sudeep Sen discusses the reception of the book, which was kept a secret from everyone prior to publication, and says that when it was published, “the Times of London treated the whole event as one would expect a tabloid to do” (621).
Although the book “in little more than a month had sold in excess of 70,000 copies” (Osborn 28), many critics, such as Marc Berley, argue that “on the whole, however, Birthday Letters is a failure” (75). He says that:
Both individually and as a collection, the poems are at once excessively narrative and excessively allusive, full of repetition, generality, and an enervating vagueness… These are, in short, egotistical poems that lack the power of a truly unshakable ego. Instead of providing answers of any kind, they only make the drama more opaque, and less interesting. (75)
James Wood claims that the book experiences a “failure to evoke its subject” because Hughes is writing about events that are no longer privately his and attempting to participate in them (33).
Lyall says that the collection of poems is “written much more simplistically, as straightforward narratives that behave like prose”. Kathryn Harrison says that “the poems that make up Birthday Letters range from frightening to deeply sad; it is a compelling, irresistibly readable collection” (150). David Eldridge says that in Birthday Letters, “Ted Hughes gives us an emotional and psychological insight into his relationship with Sylvia Plath – both during her life and after her suicide”.
One of the main arguments among critics is Hughes’ purpose in writing Birthday Letters. Sarah Churchwell refers to Birthday Letters as “a public response to disputes over the politics of publication, representation, and literary authority” (103). Many critics argue that the sole purpose of writing the book was to take the blame off of himself for his wife’s death. Katha Pollitt argues that the book “presents itself as an unambiguous rebuke to those who saw Sylvia Plath as Ted Hughes’s victim” (4). She also claims that that within this book the readers are to acknowledge “The Truth About Sylvia” which is that Plath was “beautiful, brilliant, violent, crazy, doomed” and that Hughes says “I loved her, I did my best to make her happy, but she was obsessed with her dead father, and it killed her” (4). Woods claims that Hughes’ poems are full of blame and merely “a hysteric’s progress, recorded by a husband who was not hysterical enough to comprehend his wife” (31).
On the other hand, there are critics who argue that relieving himself of blame for his wife’s death was not Hughes’ purpose of publishing Birthday Letters. Alan Williamson says that “Hughes’s task, in that best sense, was not to fix blame, but to reexperience his love for the woman had set such a stamp on his entire life” (13). Also, Carolyne Wright says that Hughes “seems to seek no less than reconciliation with Plath and with his younger self, across the boundary of life and death” (152). She also points out that Plath committed suicide when she and Hughes were not together and he was with another woman. She argues that alone, Plath was “more vulnerable, more shaky, more susceptible to impulsive actions than either she or her husband might have foreseen she would be without his stabilizing presence” (153).
Ruth Padel examines the violence involved in Hughes works. She writes that “Ted Hughes’ verbs find the violence in the frailest, gentlest things” (32). She says that his ruthlessness comes naturally. The readers notice a change, however, in the poetry presented in Birthday Letters. In his introduction to his dissertation on Ted Hughes’ book, David Watling notes Hughes’ honors but suggests that this book veers down a completely different path than his other works.
Not only did the poems address the previously off-limits topics of Hughes’s life with Plath, but they were also (on the surface, at least) more intimate and vulnerable and emotionally direct than any of Hughes’s previous verse, which had garnered Hughes a perhaps undeserved reputation for poetry of unsparing harshness. (8)
Ander Porter also did her dissertation on this work and agreed with Watling’s idea, writing that the poetry presented within Birthday Letters is “a new, and some suspect a declining, chapter in Hughes’ career” (22). She says this is due to the fact that “he is writing about his relationship with Plath through poetry, but not his poetry” (22). Diann Blakely says that the poetry in his book “documents the poet’s inability to evolve a style capable of rendering the subtler reds of domestic teeth and claws” (117). Sen notices the change in Hughes’ poems in this collection as well, noting that “quite unlike what we have seen in the restrained and noncontroversial poems of the past, Hughes… has written an open letter not just to his wife but to the whole world” (621). Not only that, but “the poems in Birthday Letters show Hughes’s many different domestic sides-repairing, spending, nursing, tendering-a side unavailable to us in his work so far” (621).
Although critics may argue about the purpose of the publication of the collection, all agree that the poems presented within Birthday Letters are a drastic change for Hughes and a negative change that led to his demise. Blakely says that “cancer was a factor in Hughes’s decision to release” the book (117). After the publication of the book, Hughes was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize but “in a sign of his weakening condition, sent a speech instead of accepting the prize in person” (Lyall). Sen puts it best, when writing on the impact of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, and he says:
A sense of deep grief (and love) pervades the entire sequence of eighty-eight poems. One would look at Ted Hughes (and Sylvia Plath) very differently now; one cannot but do so. Birthday Letters leaves us deeply affected, flurried, and quietly changed, even if only slightly. And this cannot be said of many books in the sea of contemporaneous literature. (Sen 622)
Works Cited
Berley, Marc. “The Widower”. Commentary 105.5 (May 1998): 74-76.
Blakely, Diann. “The Birthday Letters”. The Antioch Review 57.1 (Winter 1999): 117.
Bundtzen, Lynda K. “Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes as Orpheus in ‘Birthday Letters'”. Journal of Modern Literature 23.3/4 (Summer 2000):455-69.
Churchwell, Sarah. “Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes’ ‘Birthday Letters'”.
Contemporary Literature 42.1 (Spring 2001): 102-248.
Eldridge, David. “‘Birthday Letters’and Telling the Truth”. Birthday Letters. . 15 Nov 2006.
Harrison, Kathryn. “Connubial Abyss: The mysterious narrative of marriage”. Harper’s Magazine 300.1797 (Feb 2000): 83-88.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Dedicated Poet, Fond of Escape and Freedom”. New York Times 14 Oct 2003: E9.
Lyall, Sarah. “Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet and Sylvia Plath’s Husband, Dies”. New York Times 30 Oct 1998: A1.
Osborn, Alan. “Best-selling Brits: The UK’s Hottest Names in Print”. Europe 14.12 (Apr 1998): 28-29.
Padel, Ruth. “‘Ragged dirty undated letters’: this was how Ted Hughes once described his poems. Ruth Padel reads the messages he left behind”. Financial Times 20 Dec 2003: 32.
Page, Ra. “Obituary: Ted Hughes: Miraculous gift”. New Statesman 11.529 (Nov 1998): 55.
Pollitt, Katha. Peering Into the Bell Jar”. New York Times Book Review (Mar 1998): 4-5.
Porter, Andrea. “‘Your story, my story'”: Ted Hughes’ ‘Birthday Letters'”. Diss. Mississippi State U., 1999.
Richardson, Jean. “Hughes Wins the Whitbread”. Publishers Weekly 246.5 (Feb 1999): 17.
Sen, Sudeep. “Birthday Letters”. World Literature Today 72.3 (Summer 1998): 621-22.
Watling, Douglas. “‘Still Time to Talk’: Ted Hughes as confessional poet in ‘Birthday Letters'”. Diss. U of New Brunswick (), 2004.
Williamson, Alan. “A Marriage Between Writers: ‘Birthday Letters’ as Memoir and as Poetry”. The American Poetry Review 27.5 (Sept/Oct 1998): 11-13.
Wood, James. “Muck Funnel”. The New Republic 218.13 (Mar 1998): 30-33.
Wright, Carolyne. “The Poet’s Inquest”. The American Scholar 67.3 (Summer 1998): 150-52.
