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A Biographical Approach to Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters

This paper examines Ted Hughes’s last collection, Birthday Letters, which is read here as displaying a different portrait of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. It is generally known that Plath suffered emotional torment during her complicated married life, largely because of Hughes’ philandering. But in Birthday Letters Hughes frankly records his fond memories of her and their troubled relationship, and this collection can be read as a source which sheds new light on the marriage of two poets. Doubtless, it was Hughes’ behaviors that caused the break-down of this relationship, but it can also be speculated that Plath was either too sensitive or too ambitious for her literary career to be content with being a famous poet’s wife. After all, Birthday Letters makes a frank confession of a guilty husband and at the same time constitutes a fine collection of poems that bear the signature of two competing poetic souls.