Page from a Birthday Letters notebook, showing drafts of unpublished poems. © The British Library

The British Library has acquired an archive that promises to shed new light on the hitherto undisclosed life of one of the towering figures of twentieth century literary life; the poet Ted Hughes.

Over 220 files and boxes of manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries and ephemera have been acquired by the library, effectively illuminating the last forty years in the life of the late poet laureate, who died in 1998.

The remarkable collection promises to be an invaluable resource for researchers interested in all areas of Hughes’ prolific and wide-ranging career.

Of particular interest to scholars and public alike will most likely be the material relating to the production of the Birthday Letters, Hughes’ highly personal book of poems developed in response to the suicide in 1963 of his estranged wife, the poet Sylvia Plath.

The book, published in 1998 just before his death, is seen by many as his swansong and a kind of paean to his long dead wife.

Page of a notebook, showing Hughes’ research notes on the Egyptian gods. © British Library. © The British Library

Scrawled in spidery black ink into simple school exercise books, the archive reveals Hughes’ working title for the volume of poems as, “The Sorrows of the Deer” and scholars will be keen to study the earlier versions of the published poems as well as several that didn’t make the final book.

“What happened that Saturday Night” is one of the unpublished explorations of Plath’s suicide and the poet’s response to it, in which he writes: “I want to know what can never be known…”

The pain and anguish Hughes felt in writing and publishing the poems is also revealed in a letter to fellow poet Seamus Heaney, dated New Year’s Day 1998.

He begins by describing how he wanted Heaney’s opinion about the poems “above everybody’s.” He goes on to describe the publication of the Birthday Letters as a “gamble.”

“Because I’d come to the point where there seemed no alternative,” he continues, “I just couldn’t bear to go on with them stuck in my craw.”

“Given the funny old physical corner I’ve got myself into and the mysterious role in my life that SP’s posthumous life has played – and that our posthumous marriage has played. Publication came to seem like a matter of life and death.”

© The British Library

(Above) Front cover of a Birthday Letters notebook, a school exercise book showing details of its previous owner. Also shown is a page from the notebook with a ‘mind-map’ by Hughes, recording the genesis of his thoughts relating to the volume. Early Birthday Letters manuscript, dating from 1970s.

One thing that clearly emerges is how the Birthday Letters were something that Hughes wrestled with for many years.

“The archives show the conflicts he was going through – how he worked things out in prose before working them up into poetry,” explained Rachel Foss, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library. “It absolutely gives the lie to the idea that the Birthday Letters was a rush, a spontaneous overflow of emotion that he just got out onto the page.”

“He was writing the Birthday Letters much earlier than anyone realised – for a period of 25 years,” she added. “He then published them six months before his death so it really dominated his life and I think the archive shows the extent to which this was a key event in his life.”

“I think this material will be a fertile ground for future publishing,” added Rachel. “There’s certainly potential for the publication of a new edition of the Birthday Letters, including the unpublished material, the drafts tracing how he got to the sub genesis of the idea – through the successive stages of the composition right through to the finished product. This is the stuff waiting to be discovered.”

Beyond feeding the seemingly endless appetite for detail about Hughes’ work and thoughts relating to Sylvia Plath, the archive offers a wealth of revealing material about the wider career and thinking of the poet, the farmer and the private man.

There is an extensive collection of correspondence with other leading literary figures, including Andrew Motion, Kathleen Raine, Thom Gunn and Tom Paulin. Engaging diary entries and journals reveal the surprisingly humour-filled day-to-day existence of a man who was often perceived to be austere and who could be notoriously guarded about his privacy.

© The British Library

(Above) Birthday Letters notebook, showing an early autograph draft of ‘Fulbright Scholars’. Also shows a working draft of Hughes’s numbering system for the collection and reveals that he had originally intended to call the volume The Sorrows of the Deer.

In one diary entry he describes his comical attempts at trying to halter a bull. He also relates at length his experiences as a fisherman.

For Hughes, fishing was a hugely symbolic metaphor. Rather like poetry, it was about bringing something out of the dark and into the light of consciousness. Given the popularity of angling literature there may be a Hughes fishing volume in the not too distant future. There are also unpublished works on Shakespeare and a raft of unseen children’s literature.

Other items from his research notes vary in subject matter - from musings on Egyptian gods to Zoroastrianism. Taken as whole they offer a rounded understanding of a much-misunderstood poet.

The purchase follows similar recent acquisitions for the library, including the Harold Pinter Archives and the Beryl Bainbridge and Angela Carter papers. But it is the Hughes archive that will probably have the most impact and attract literary scholars in search of new insights and discoveries.

A cataloguer is due to be appointed next week with a view to making the whole collection available to researchers. Whatever their interest in Hughes, it seems they will not be disappointed.