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
Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress The Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress are awarded by the Library of Congress. In 1943, during his tenure as Librarian of Congress (1939–1944), poet Archibald MacLeish appointed poet Allen Tate as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1941–1986, the predecessor of the current Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress). Tate, in turn, created an advisory panel of "Fellows in American Letters," which, over the course of the next few years, would include most of the pillars of English modernist literature. Among