'Still time to talk': Ted Hughes as confessional poet in 'Birthday Letters'

This thesis explores how Ted Hughes's unexpected emergence as a confessional poet in Birthday Letters (1998), his last collection of verse, is also the final evolutionary step in his poetic development. It argues that early verse like "The Jaguar" and the poems from Crow typecast Hughes as a poet of nature and myth while his verse was exhibiting a shifting emotional dynamic that brought him closer and closer to confessionalism. Although confessionalism as a movement was defunct by the time of Birthday Letters, this study illustrates how Hughes's confessional approach becomes the governing structural strategy in the Birthday Letters poems.; This strategy in Birthday Letters is dependent on Hughes's maintenance of a private dialogue with Sylvia Plath that effectively deflects the public debate that surrounded their relationship. Blending "myth and dailiness" into a counter-mythology that demythologizes the public story of his life with Plath, Hughes moves beyond the strictly confessional to a more mature post-confessional approach.