Birthday Letters is a deeply personal collection of 88 poems by Ted Hughes, published in 1998, written in catharsis following his wife Sylvia Plath’s suicide.
It is believed that he was constructing his oeuvre over a period of at least 25 years, from around the time of Plath’s death in 1963 until its date of publication. After publishing his wife’s intimate and hugely successful poetry collection Ariel after her death, Hughes’ Birthday Letters was then released and widely viewed as a textual conversation given the couple’s famously turbulent marriage. His male perspective sheds a different light on the relationship, thereby highlighting the disparities arising from gendered voices in literature and in life.
