Death of a Poet

Ted Hughes died 25 years ago. But not before he shared "Birthday Letters" with the world—88 pieces written for Sylvia Plath "mainly to evoke her presence to myself and to feel her there listening.”

Ted Hughes by Fay Godwin © British Library Board

By Michael Judge

Tragically, a quarter-century after his death in October 1998 much of what you read about England’s then-poet laureate, Ted Hughes, still focuses on the controversy surrounding the suicide of his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. One U.S. journalist, writing shortly after Hughes’s death, unilaterally declared that “Plath’s posthumous fame threatened to completely overshadow Hughes’s own career.”

Anyone familiar with Hughes’s life and work knows that’s utter nonsense, and that the poet who died in his late 60s of heart failure while undergoing treatment for colon cancer was never one to confuse “fame” and “career.” Plath, on the other hand—at least early on—seemed to have an acutely American desire for the limelight. Unfortunately, her hard-fought battles with bipolar disorder and depression fueled her sometimes public highs and lows, and the press corps (and tabloids) gobbled up the fascinating couple’s every mov…