‘An illegal private transaction’: Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and Epistolarity

Abstract

The publication of Ted Hughes‘s Birthday Letters in 1998 caused a sensation well beyond poetry circles and represented a striking late transformation in the poetics of this giant of contemporary British verse. Hughes, it seemed, had finally validated the post-war confessional impulse he had spent decades resisting. Accordingly, the eighty-eight poems in this collection have been afforded significant critical attention; but much less analysis has been offered of the volume's title, and, consequently, of its epistolary status. To put this another way, Birthday Letters has been mined for its (chiefly biographical) meaning, but the vehicle which Hughes chose to make meaning warrants deeper analysis if the collection is to be properly understood. This discussion explores Birthday Letters in relation to epistolarity. It locates the volume within a tradition of verse epistles, and thinks through the implications of these poems’ epistolary form.