Birthday Letters Birthday Letters Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" marriage. Until the publication of this book, 35 years after Plath's suicide, Hughes had said and published nearly nothing about his relationship and life with Plath. When it was discovered that he had infidelities
Letters to a Young Poet into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke's poetry and his working process. Further, these letters were written during a key period of Rilke's early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of "Das Stunden-Buch" ("The Book of Hours") and "Das Buch der Bilder" ("The Book of Images"). In 1929, Franz Xaver Kappus compiled ten letters that he received from Rainer Maria Rilke that were written from 1902 to 1908 and published them under the title "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter" ("Letters to a Young Poet") through Insel Verlag