Oct. 7: A previously unseen poem by British poet Ted Hughes, who was married for a short period to American writer and poet Sylvia Plath, was published on Thursday about his wife’s suicide.
Last letter, which was published by New Statesman, describes what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of Sylvia Plath. Its first line goes: “What happened that night? Your final night.” It ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his first wife’s death.
Hughes, who died in 1998, was Britain’s poet laureate from 1984 until his death. In March this year, it was announced that he will be honoured with a memorial at Poets’ Corner in the Westminster Abbey.
The Poets’ Corner in South Transept of the Westminster Abbey is Britain’s most famous resting place for great writers, playwrights and poets. Literary greats like Chaucer, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy are buried at the Abbey and memorials for W.H. Auden, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, Lord Byron, Coleridge, Keats, T.S. Eliot are present at the Poets’ Corner.
Hughes’ best-known work is Birthday Letters, a collection of poems published in 1998 that detail his relationship with Plath. The poems make reference to Plath’s suicide, which occurred in February 1963.
None of the poems, however, address directly the circumstances of her death. This poem, according to New Statesman, would appear to be the “missing link” in the sequence.
The poem was found in a notebook held in the British Library’s Ted Hughes archive. The earliest draft of Last Letter appears in a blue school-style exercise book, which is believed to date from the 1970s. The book contains drafts of several poems that appear in Birthday Letters.