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 in Leipzig. Rilke and Kappus never met in person. In an introduction to the collection, Kappus recounts how he came to write to Rainer Maria Rilke. According to Kappus, in late 1902 while a student at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria, he was reading Rilke's poetry. He was approached by the academy's chaplain, Horacek, who noted that Rilke had been a pupil years earlier at the academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten. Horacek expressed surprise that the former pupil had "become a poet" and described to Kappus the young Rilke as a "thin, pale boy"