Ted Hughes Unfinished Drafts Tell of Sylvia Plath's "Screams and Death"

Ted Hughes’s courtship of Sylvia Plath and the deterioration of their relationship into “screams and death” are explored in a pair of his unpublished drafts for poems printed for the first time in The Times today.

The two drafts, labelled with the Roman numerals VI and X, were part of the Poet Laureate’s 30-year endeavour to set down his thoughts about his first wife, who killed herself at the age of 31. In the unpublished verse, Hughes evokes the raw energy of his early relationship with Plath and wonders whether his memories of perfection are real or an illusion.

He kept his thoughts private until 1998, when he knew that he only had a short time to live. Hughes, who had cancer, selected 88 poems for publication in Birthday Letters, his final anthology of new work. VIand X, which he wrote in the late 1980s or early 1990s, failed to make the cut.

They are printed today with permission of Hughes’s estate, which announced this week that it has deposited the poet’s archive with the British Library in a £500,000 deal. It contains scores of other unpublished drafts – described by the author as “germinal notes” – that he declined to publish during his lifetime, as well as letters, journals and fishing diaries.

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The two drafts appear in a school exercise book marked “18 Rugby Street”, Hughes’s address in London in the early 1960s where he and Plath spent their first night together after she came down from Cambridge. On the inside cover he has made a list of poems under the title The Sorrow of the Deer, the working title for Birthday Letters. The book, which is 15 pages long, is filled with drafts of poems, about half of which went on to be published.

It is unclear why Hughes declined to publish VI and X, but curators at the library believe that the poet excluded them to make room for poems that describe the later stages of their relationship. Jamie Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, believes that Hughes was not necessarily dissatisfied with the drafts. “I think it is more to do with the balance he was trying to strike in Birthday Letters,” he said. “Inevitably over 20 years there are going to be paths that you take that don’t come to fruition.”

He said that Hughes would not have objected to the drafts being made public. The poet was conscious that his notes would arouse interest after his death and destroyed information he did not want to survive. He admitted destroying Plath’s final journal because he did not want their children to read it.

Mr Andrews suggested that the final lines of VI, which compares Hughes’s relationship with Plath to a railway, seemed unfinished. “It seems like he has got this idea about the tracks that he hasn’t quite worked through.”

The date of the drafts is unclear, but a combination of handwriting analysis and the advanced state of the poem list suggest that Hughes wrote them about ten years before he published his final anthology. Exercise books in the archive show how Hughes’s handwriting transformed from compact, spidery script to a bolder, free-flowing style. The difficulty of deciphering the handwriting means that the published transcript is approximate.

VI and X appear to be late drafts because of the relatively small number of corrections. Other incomplete poems in the archive, which comprises more than 220 files and containers, were abandoned at earlier stages. In one, The Book Jacket, Hughes repeatedly tried to describe his reaction to seeing a new edition of The Bell Jar, Plath’s most celebrated anthology. His crossings out show his struggle to express his feelings about a photograph of Plath holding a long-stemmed rose and he eventually appears to give up.