‘Exaggerated American’: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters

For an account of the publication and reception of Birthday Letters see Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, London, Faber and Faber, 2000, 1–31.Google Scholar

Ibid. For a critique of Wagner’s approach seeGoogle Scholar

Jo Gill, ‘“While My Pen Travels On”’, Swansea Review, 21 (2001), 103–11.Google Scholar

Paul Giles, ‘Double Exposure: Sylvia Plath and the Aesthetics of Transnationalism’, Symbiosis, 5.2 (2001), 103–20 (p. 106).Google Scholar

Anne Whitehead, ‘Refiguring Orpheus: The Possession of the Past in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters’, Textual Practice, 13.2 (1999), 22741Google Scholar

Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes as Orpheus in Birthday Letters’, Journal of Modern Literature, 23 (2000), 455–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Neil Spencer, ‘Stargazer Laureate’, Observer Life, 1 February 1998, p. 43.Google Scholar

Ann Skea, ‘Poetry and Magic’, paper delivered at the Ted Hughes 2000, International Conference, Lyon, France, Feb. 2000 (accessed at https://doi.org/www.zeta.org/au/-annskea/PoetMag.htm on 20 June 2002).Google Scholar

A number of critics have examined Plath’s relationship with England. Hughes’s relationship with America has been subjected to less scrutiny. For the former, see Tracy Brain, ‘“Your Puddle-jumping daughter”: Sylvia Plath’s Midatlanticism’, English, 47 (1998), 17–39, andGoogle Scholar

Tim Kendall, ‘Sylvia Plath’s “Piranha Religion”’, Essays in Criticism, 49.1 (1999), 44–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Brain, p. 21.Google Scholar

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, London, Virago, 1991, p. 5.Google Scholar

Ted Hughes, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, The Paris Review, 134 (1995), 54–94 (p. 77).Google Scholar

Giles, p. 105.Google Scholar

In proposing this term, Giles distinguishes between those who ‘read literature in national rather than transnational terms.’ p. 103.Google Scholar

Ibid. pp 105-6.Google Scholar

Peter Davison, ‘Dear Sylvia’, The Boston Globe 8 February 1998, G1.Google Scholar

‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, p. 77. Denise Levertov, the English-born poet who moved to America as a young woman in the mid-1940s, makes a similar observation about her own experience: ‘having married American literature, it seemed, as well as an American husband.’ Qtd. in Alice Entwistle, ‘“At Home Everywhere and Nowhere”: Denise Levertov’s “Domestic” Muse’ in Jane Dowson, ed., Women’s Writing 1945–1960: After the Deluge, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2003, 98–114 (p. 101).Google Scholar

The argument of Robert Crawford’s Identifying Poets is relevant here: ‘It is the outwardlooking, expansive gaze which makes possible the interaction with a ‘significant other’, a foreign culture in which gifts for the future of one’s own culture may be located, and in which an illuminating reflection of one’s own identity (or desired identity) may be glimpsed. That foreign culture may be geographically or linguistically or temporally ‘other’, or a combination of these.’ Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993, p. 12.Google Scholar

In Plath’s Journals, for example, she explains: ‘I find myself horrified at voicing the American dream of a home and children.’ Karen V. Kukil, ed., The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962, London, Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 411.Google Scholar

Ibid. p. 446.Google Scholar

Ibid. p. 644.Google Scholar

Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 11.Google Scholar

Gill, p. 108.Google Scholar

See https://doi.org/exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbright (accessed on 04 July 2002).

A Choice of Whitman’s Verse, London, Faber and Faber, 1968.Google Scholar

There is a further allusion in ‘Fulbright Scholars’ to Eliot’s writing. The metaphor of the peach suggests a connection with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. For Prufrock — anxious, querulous, self-conscious, like Hughes’s speaker — is also floored by a peach: ‘Do I dare eat a peach’, he asks. Do I dare enter into a sensuous, extravagant, foreign, potentially messy encounter? T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–1962, London, Faber and Faber, 1974.Google Scholar

‘Notes for a Comparison between American and European Romanticism’, Journal of American Studies 2.1 (1968), 83–103 (p. 99).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jacqueline Rose notes the ambivalence of Plath’s position in this context, asking ‘what is the legacy after the Second World War of a German-speaking father for an American girl?’ On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, London, Chatto & Windus, 2003, p. 53.Google Scholar

Entwistle, p. 98.Google Scholar

See Sagar, p. 6.Google Scholar

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1981.Google Scholar

Hughes was to recall of his and Plath’s experiments with the ouija board: ‘“spirits” would regularly arrive with instructions for her from one Prince Otto, who was said to be a great power in the underworld.’ ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’ in Paul Alexander, ed., Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath, New York, Harper and Row, 1985, p. 155.Google Scholar

Jon Silkin, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981.Google Scholar

As Jean Baudrillard notes, ‘It may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum.’ America, trans. Chris Turner, London and New York, Verso, 1989, p. 28.Google Scholar

Joan Riviere in ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ describes a tendency for some women to ‘put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’, in Shelley Saguaro, ed., Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000, 70–78 (p. 70).Google Scholar

Josh Cohen notes the ‘new primacy of spectacle as a constitutive force of both state and economic power which has permeated everyday life in postmodern America’, Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing, London, Pluto, 1998, p. 2.Google Scholar

As Seamus Heaney usefully points out, it is necessary to question what kind of Englishness, if any, Hughes represents: ‘“Hughes’ voice is in rebellion against a certain kind of demeaned, mannerly voice... against English middle-class culture”’. Qtd. in William Scammell, ‘A Poet Pinned and Wriggling’, Independent on Sunday (1 November 1998), p. 3.Google Scholar

Eliot, Collected Poems. Edmund Spenser’s ‘Sonnet 75’ (‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand, / But came the waves and washèd it away’) with its meditation on time, writing, and memory is another possible subtext. I am grateful to Heidi Macpherson for suggesting this connection. See also Richard Gray, ‘The Problem of Literary Nationality: The Case of T.S. Eliot’ in American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Harlow, Longman, 1990, 336–46. In an essay on T.S. Eliot, ‘The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S. Eliot’, Hughes describes ‘Prufrock’ as an expression of Eliot’s ‘own peculiar agony’ — a judgement which could, surely, also stand for Birthday Letters.Google Scholar

William Scammell, ed., Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, London, Faber and Faber, 1994, 268–92 (p.274).Google Scholar

The New Poetry, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, p. 20.Google Scholar

The Politics of Postmodernism, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, p. 81.Google Scholar

Antony Easthope, Wordsworth Now and Then: Romanticism and Contemporary Culture, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1993, p. 7.Google Scholar

Drayton views America as the natural home of poetry: ‘as there plenty grows / Of laurel everywhere, / Apollo’s sacred tree.’ M.H. Abrams, et al eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Vol. 1, New York, Norton, 2000Google Scholar

John Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ (1630), Nina Baym, et al eds, The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Vol. 1, New York, Norton, 1998.Google Scholar

Sansom, ‘I was there, I saw it’, London Review of Books, 19 February 1998, 8–9; Skea, ‘Poetry and Magic’, np.Google Scholar

Hughes’s disappointment and frustration with his reception by some hostile American readers in the aftermath of Plath’s death may be a subtext here.Google Scholar

Tanner, p. 98.Google Scholar

In ‘God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs do not Bark’, Hughes writes, of a Cambridge college’s hostile reaction to Plath’s poetry: ‘They let you know that you were not John Donne / / […] they let you know, day by day, / Their contempt for everything you attempted’.Google Scholar

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, London, Faber and Faber, 1979, 218–25.Google Scholar

Journals, p. 521.Google Scholar

Journals, p. 445.Google Scholar

Sagar, p. 7.Google Scholar

‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, p. 59.Google Scholar

Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York, Double Day, 1989, p. 3.Google Scholar

Brain, pp 17. 19.Google Scholar

The metaphors throughout the poem look back to Plath’s ‘Daddy’ mentioned above, with its allusions to ‘the waters of beautiful Nauset’.Google Scholar

Giles, p. 104.Google Scholar