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
James Thomson (poet, born 1834) biography, "The Life of James Thomson (B.V.)". Thomson's pseudonym, "Bysshe Vanolis", derives from the names of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Novalis. He is often distinguished from the earlier Scottish poet James Thomson by the letters "B.V." after the name. James Thomson (poet, born 1834) James Thomson (23 November 1834 – 3 June 1882), who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem "The City of Dreadful Night" (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment. Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, at the