Ariel's Gift

When Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim. Few suspected that Ted Hughes had been at work, for a quarter of a century, on a cycle of poems addressed almost entirely to his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. Here, Erica Wagner provides a commentary on the Birthday Letters poems, indicating the events that shaped them and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Sylvia Plath's own work.