Ted Hughes Archive comes to British Library

Yesterday The British Library announced the acquisition of an important archive of papers, letters, diaries and manuscripts of Ted Hughes, including draft materials for The Birthday Letters as well as other manuscripts dating from earlier periods. This makes the BL the biggest repository of Hughes materials after the Woodruff Library at Emory University, and complements the collections the BL already owns, which consists of correspondence between Hughes and Leonard Baskin and correspondence with Keith Sager. Both of these also contain numerous typesripts and duplicate xerox copies.

The press has picked up on Hughes's emotional investment in Birthday Letters, but in itself this is not a "new" element. In a letter to Keith Sagar, Hughes wrote: “Poetical effects incidental. Very self-exposing, I suppose, unquashed—my attempt to write about those things without aesthetic exploitation or concern for my artistic reputation. I no longer give much thought to that. Except to write clearly and expressively. Simply. No style. Plain. It will bring the sky down on my head, if I publish it—about 90-100 pieces. But so what. The sky’s fallen anyway” (15 August 1997, BL Add MSS 78760-194v).

What will be new is the evolution and development of the poems: “Once I’d determined to do it [publish Birthday Letters] and put them together & started repairing them wherever I could, & writing the few last ones, I suddenly had free energy I hadn’t had since Crow” (Ted Hughes to Keith Sagar, 18 June 1998, BL Add. MSS 78761-21). It will be interesting to see what "repairing" actually meants and how incidental style and poetical effect really were.

The earliest drafts for Birthday Letters, which Hughes originally planned to call "The Sorrows of the Deer", are in a notebook, which goes on display at the BL in The Sir John Ritblat Gallery as of 15 October.