They did not, for example, bear comparison with Thomas Hardy’s poems about his first wife (1912–1913), or with Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (1985), also written in memory of his first wife. For on the whole, these “last poems” (written over a quarter of a century) were not among his best.

But Hughes’s death was accompanied by the British press’s intense scrutiny of Birthday Letters and by a tide of critical praise which certainly had as much to do with the fact that the dying Hughes had revealed his feelings at last as with the quality of the work itself. In the intervening years he weathered storms of criticism, abuse, and accusation which would have finished off a less resilient (or less well loved) man much sooner. That life was a matter on which, despite numerous provocations, he had been almost silent since Plath’s suicide in 1963. The book which drew by far the most attention, though, was Birthday Letters, Hughes’s poems to and about Sylvia Plath and their life together.

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was a prolific writer, but in his last ten years he published a torrent of work- Tales from Ovid translations of Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Wedekind’s Spring Awakening Rain-Charm for the Duchy, which contains the verse he wrote as poet laureate his immense critical book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being his selected short stories his occasional prose thematic editions of his earlier poetry a large anthology, The School Bag, compiled with Seamus Heaney a selection from Coleridge and much else besides.

Tales from ovid ted hughes sparknotes