Birthday Letters fascination with a persistent mystery surrounding the lives of the two icons. Within a short period of time the collection was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry and Whitbread British Book of the Year prizes. 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
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"