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
Francis Webb (poet) until 1953. The creative product of these years, including his famous poems 'Birthday' (about Adolf Hitler's last hours) and 'The Canticle' (a poem about the life of Francis of Assisi), was self-published in his third collection simply entitled "Birthday" (1953). In late 1953 Webb returned to England. On his trip to England he made a stopover in India, the inspiration for such poems as 'Song of Hunger' and 'Back Street in Calcutta'. But once in England he was confined at a number of asylums over a period of seven years. During this time he wrote many of the poems, including