Very few poets write their best work late in life. This makes Ted Hughes’s late artistic flowering all the more exceptional. After becoming Poet Laureate, (always something of a poisoned chalice) few thought he would reach again the power of his early work. Then, unexpectedly, in the last 18 months of his life, he published ‘Tales from Ovid’, a translation of the classic text that would win numerous awards and finally, ‘Birthday Letters’, the poems he had been secretly composing since the death by suicide of his first wife the American poet Sylvia Plath.
Blamed by many for Plath’s tragic suicide, Hughes had struggled to escape the long shadow cast by her early death. Hundreds of second hand fictional accounts of their love affair had retold the story, while Hughes himself remained silent. Then came a volume of poetry, ‘Birthday Letters’ composed over 30 years, each poem addressed to Sylvia. A literary sensation when it appeared in 1998, it remains a painstaking act of remembrance and love.
Long before the publication of ‘Birthday Letters’ catapulted Hughes back into the literary spotlight I had fallen under the spell of his early work, particularly his first volume of poetry ‘The Hawk in the Rain’. It contains his famous poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, the story of which is recounted in the short video link below. It is a poem of primitive and animalistic force – much like the man himself. For me, Hughes’s reading of this poem captures something of his magnetic presence.
