"Last Letter": Ted Hughes Poem on Sylvia Plath's Death

My pal Juan (djmeow_mix on Twitter) tipped me off on this one a couple of days ago. The U.K.'s weekly mag The New Statesman published a Ted Hughes poem for the first time today. You might know that Hughes was the unfaithful English husband of Sylvia Plath, a great American poet. I'm not saying she was great because that's what we tend to say about creative people who kill themselves. I think if she had stayed alive and kept writing into her old age, she would have been even greater, certainly on par with Dickinson and Whitman and Hughes. That's Langston Hughes, of course.

And you might also know that Ted Hughes published a collection of poetry called The Birthday Letters in 1998, which dealt a lot with his relationship with Plath and her suicide. It was a best-seller and won a bunch of prizes, which he probably didn't get to enjoy much because he also died in 1998, though he certainly reaped huge benefits from Plath's work and her death over the years. I haven't read The Birthday Letters, but I will soon and tell you what I think, so, you know, be looking forward to that. This poem, "Last Letter," is apparently an outtake from that collection.


I don't know how to get my hands on The New Statesman, but you can hear parts of the poem in this news story, in which you will also learn that the Brits kind of love Ted Hughes. Maybe that's because from the twentieth century onward, the Brits haven't had as many good poets as the U.S. has. This isn't the U.K's fault; we just have more people.

Hughes's poem doesn't come off as particularly brilliant in the lines of poetry we hear in this story. "My escape had become such a hunted thing"? Blech. It seems like the news story implies Hughes left the poem out because it was too direct and painful, but maybe he left it out because he just didn't like it as much as the others. I hate the thought of someone publishing your unpublished outtakes after you die and acting as if they're more authentic and revealing somehow than your more successful work.