Birthday Letters, published in 1998 (ISBN 0-374-52581-1), is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" ...
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Birthday Letters, published in 1998 (ISBN 0-374-52581-1), is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" marriage.
Up until the publication of this anthology, 35 years after Plath's suicide, Hughes had said and published nearly nothing about his relationship and life with Plath. When it was discovered that he had infidelities while with Plath and had destroyed some of Plath's works after her death, some feminist critics depicted him as a monster and Plath as a victim. In one instance, Hughes's name was chipped off Plath's tombstone in Yorkshire.
The "Ted Hughes controversy" was in regards to his possible role in Plath's suicide and subsequent...
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