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The 100 best nonfiction books: No 4 – Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)

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These passionate, audacious poems addressed to Hughes’s late wife, Sylvia Plath, contribute to the couple’s mythology and are a landmark in English poetry

Poetry will be braided into this series like a golden thread, because in every generation it is the poets who replenish and tantalise the collective consciousness. As I’ve written already, this list is a personal inventory of some core texts, the books that I believe shaped our imagination and “made us who we are”. Birthday Letters fits that template, surviving Ted Hughes as a work of outrageous audacity, astonishing rhetorical and lyrical fervour, mixed with heartbreaking candour. In short, it is a landmark in English poetry.

In any age, the story of Ted (Hughes) and Sylvia (Plath) would be a chapter torn from the playbook of romantic tragedy. Furthermore, in the Anglo-American literary tradition, the marriage of two great contemporary poets from opposite sides of the Atlantic must be a source of endless fascination. At first, the double helix of love and work inspired some remarkable poems, but add the early suicide of one, and the lifelong torment of the other, and you have the makings of a myth. When, in the late summer of 1997, Hughes walked into the offices of his publisher, Faber & Faber, with the manuscript of 88 poems addressed to his dead wife, he was chiselling the synopsis of a stupendous private drama high into the north face of Parnassus. Birthday Letters, the manuscript in question, published in 1998, became the most sensational new collection of poems in living memory.

Hughes was tormented by the vociferous fans of Plath who wanted to hold him to account for her suicide in 1963

Related: Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life review – a man smouldering with life

Carol Hughes has tried to do her best by her husband’s work. She always knew about the last letter, and what it revealed

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