Birthday Letters [Hardcover]

Ted Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1998 | ISBN-10: 0374112967 | ISBN-13: 978-0374112967 | Edition: 1st Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ed

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."

Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:

Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.

Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it.

From 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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ed edition (February 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374112967
• ISBN-13: 978-0374112967
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #754,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #21 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( P ) > Plath, Sylvia

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It presents snapshots frozen in time., April 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Birthday Letters (Hardcover)

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 intensity of their relationship. A sense of fatality seems to be an integral part of the relationship, right from the beginning:

"Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes."

A suicide, they say, kills two people - the one who dies and the one who doesn't. As the survivor who didn't, Ted Hughes has silently borne his private hell over the last thirty-five years. This is what the poems testify. But if writing them must have been a painful process, breaking his silence and compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so he speaks of the
"Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell."

Images and themes from Plath's work find their way repeatedly into Hughes' poems. "Sam" refers to the time when Plath's horse (Ariel) ran wild. She had hung on to his neck and returned to the stables in a state of shock. The image of the Hanging God from Plath figures several times and is linked to the Daddy figure that, according to Hughes and other Plath critics, was the harbinger of doom in her life. The arrow symbol of "Ariel," the fixed stars governing one's life, the Bronte countryside, the man in black, the stalking panther, azalea flowers, the works of Giorgio de Chiricio - these are images from Sylvia Plath's work that Hughes draws upon and they all testify that for him she is still a presence that he must live with whether he likes it or not.

Perhaps Hughes is trying to exonerate himself. It is not surprising that he talks about Sylvia Plath's life as a struggle to keep in control. Driven by the demons to succeed, she had to pay a heavy price for fame and recognition. In "Ouija," Hughes describes an early premonition of doom:
"Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
`Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'"
Hughes poems are like snapshots frozen in time, best understood by a reader who approaches them without prejudice against the author. They give us the survivor's story of what it was like to be bonded to a brilliant, fiery individual who was to be transformed into a myth, into something of an immortal cult figure, who was destined to live a brief but meteoric life. And who flamboyantly proclaimed that dying was an art: like everything else she did it exceptionally well.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking another look, May 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Birthday Letters: Poems (Paperback)

I have done extensive research on Sylvia Plath. I never saw her as the poor, defenseless victim many feminists portray her as, but reading about her struggles with Ted Hughes did not make him my favorite person. Reading "Birthday Letters" was quite a shock for me. The powerful emotions of grief, sorrow, and tenderness cast Mr. Hughes in a new light. I felt almost as if I were intruding on an intimate moment between him and his late wife. I was captivated by this work, but I feel knowledge of his history with Plath is essential for a full understanding of the work.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars harrowing, April 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Birthday Letters (Hardcover)

Having just read readers' reviews I am shocked at how judgemental people are, after all this time. The poetry seems to count for so little. Nobody makes someone commit suicide, it was Plath herself who chose that route. Hughes didn't murder her, he simply didn't want her any more. Anyone out there ever had someone commit suicide on them? It is those who are left behind who suffer, especially children. Any money Hughes made from this book will go straight to the Hughes-Plath children, not to Hughes for God's sake. The poetry is searing, to anyone who knows the unhappy tale of this marriage especially. The poems are like journal entries in places, and they are also powerful, disruptive narratives in what has been a very one-sided debate. I adore Plath's work, and still think it vastly underrated, but here we see the image of Hughes the Iceman having melted, to reveal the damaged human being underneath.