Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571258888
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

'To read [ Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.' Seamus Heaney

'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' Andrew Motion

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Fulbright Scholars
• Caryatids (1)
• Caryatids (2)
• Visit
• Sam
• The Tender Place
• St Botolph’s
• The Shot
• Trophies
• 18 Rugby Street
• The Machine
• God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark
• Fidelity
• Fate Playing
• The Owl
• A Pink Wool Knitted Dress
• Your Paris
• You Hated Spain
• Moonwalk
• Drawing
• Fever
• 55 Eltisley
• Chaucer
• Ouija
• The Earthenware Head
• Wuthering Heights
• The Chipmunk
• Horoscope
• Flounders
• The Blue Flannel Suit
• Child’s Park
• 9 Willow Street
• The Literary Life
• The Bird
• Astringency
• The Badlands
• Fishing Bridge
• The 59th Bear
• Grand Canyon
• Karlsbad Caverns
• Black Coat
• Portraits
• Stubbing Wharfe
• Remission
• Isis
• Epiphany
• The Gypsy
• A Dream
• The Minotaur
• The Pan
• Error
• The Lodger
• Daffodils
• The Afterbirth
• Setebos
• A Short Film
• The Rag Rug
• The Table
• Apprehensions
• Dream Life
• Perfect Light
• The Rabbit Catcher
• Suttee
• The Bee God
• Being Christlike
• The Beach
• Dreamers
• Fairy Tale
• The Blackbird
• Totem
• Robbing Myself
• Blood and Innocence
• Costly Speech
• The Inscription
• Night-Ride on Ariel
• Telos
• Brasilia
• The Cast
• The Ventriloquist
• Life after Death
• The Hands
• The Prism
• The God
• Freedom of Speech
• A Picture of Otto
• Fingers
• The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
• Red
• Praise
• About the Author
• Also by Ted Hughes
• Copyright