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“I never went back and you are dead”: Ted Hughes's 'Birthday Letters' between Autobiography and Fiction

Shortly before his death in 1998, Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, a now famous volume of poetry in which he imaginatively went back to the tumultuous years he spent with Sylvia Plath and her tragic death. Chronologically ordering the poems from their first encounter when Plath came to Britain to study on a Fulbright fellowship until well after her death when the lyric speaker warns their two children of the “dogs” that are “eating [their] mother” and “pulling at” her legacy, Hughes records moments of their life together. As poetry is traditionally exposed (and vulnerable) to readings and analyses in the context of the author's own life and autobiographical facts to a much greater extent than any other literary genre, there have been (too) many heated discussions on whether Hughes has delivered a 'truthful' account of what 'really' happened between them, whether he has glossed over the memories of his famous dead wife and whether he has downplayed his part in her tragic end. This presentation therefore sets out to explore that, while it is of course impossible to read these poems detached from the context of their marriage and the difficult relationship that Plath and Hughes had, any reading that aims only at searching for the 'truth' and/or exact biographical details of the lyric speaker and the addressee may be eventually misleading and flawed.

T. Hughes; poetry; autobiography; memory; fiction

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