Poetry for Students

204 Poetry for Students

Sources

Auden, W. H., “Musée de Beaux Arts” in Collected Poems,

Random House, 1991.

Bere, Carol, “Owning the Facts of His Life: Ted Hughes’s

Birthday Letters,” in Literary Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, Sum-

mer 1998, pp. 556–61.

Emerson, Bo, “In a New Light,” in the Atlanta Journal-Con-

stitution, March 19, 1999.

Firchow, Peter, Review of New Selected Poems, 1957–1994,

inWorld Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp.

407–08.

Merwin, W. S., “Something of His Own to Say,” in New

York Times Book Review, October 6, 1957, p. 43.

Further Reading

Hughes, Ted, New Selected Poems, 1957–1994, Faber and

Faber, 1995.

When Hughes came out with this collection, many

readers were surprised to find a selection at the

end of this book of previously unpublished poems

that were unmistakably written to and about his

late wife Sylvia Plath. This comprehensive book

provides an excellent overview of Hughes’s entire

career and a first glimpse of the much-sought

“Sylvia” poems.

Plath, Sylvia, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,

edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books, 2000.

Kukil, the supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith

College, has carefully transcribed the journals Plath

kept between 1950 and a few months prior to her sui-

cide. There is perhaps no better way to try to under-

stand her thoughts, emotions, and feelings about

Hughes than to read them in her own words.

Scigaj, Leonard M., ed., Critical Essays on Ted Hughes,

G. K. Hall, 1992.

This book contains close to twenty essays by various

critics, scholars, and poets and provides a good va-

riety of Hughes analyses. Discussions include

Hughes’s performance as poet laureate, his poetic

style, and several articles on his major volumes of

poems.

Wagner, Erica, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and

the Story of “Birthday Letters,”Faber and Faber, 2000.

Wagner’s exploration of the intense, destructive re-

lationship between Hughes and Plath is considered

one of the fairest, most comprehensive looks at the

lives of these two poets. She includes commentary to

the poems in Birthday Letters, pointing out the ac-

tual events that inspired them and explaining how

they relate to Plath’s own work. This book is both a

guide and a literary companion to Hughes’s final col-

lection.

Perfect Light

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