Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.29162/ANAFORA.v13i1.9
Ethical Credentials of Poetry: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters
Sintija Čuljat
orcid.org/0009-0008-4666-0641
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
Ted Hughes’s collection of verses entitled Birthday Letters allows for a revision of Sylvia Plath’s and his own poetic and personal histories. Hughes resorts to an inward rectification of varied extraliterary and subjective interpretations of the poets’ turbulent artistic and private rapport. Hughes shifts his impersonal poetic prism to encapsulate the entangled poetic courses revolving around separate and often infringing metaphors. Hughes’s ultimate book of verses unravels as a trajectory of two poetic selves carving a dual topography. By means of Hughes’s poetry, we partake in the genuine poetic legacies of adjacent Anglophone cultures and attend to the generation of a unique transcontinental dream. Enlivening his “goblins” so as to counter Plath’s “demons,” Hughes exerts an inalienable poetic integrity in which “myth” and “magic” attenuate the pressure of the two poet-partners’ reality. The paper employs Ted Hughes’s endeavour to defy social and critical bias in response to poetic work through none but poetic parameters. It showcases the ethical valence of poetry and the specificity of the poetic domain.
Keywords
Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, poetry, poetic covenant, revision, poetic legacy
Hrčak ID:
348118
URI
Publication date:
19.6.2026.
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