Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters

Due my friend writing her extended project on this, I have chosen to read Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. Although his poetry does not directly relate to the horror genre, I have found that some of his poems use aspects of horror;    as it [horror] is defined as: provoking a response, emotional, psychological or physical within each individual that causes someone to react with fear. Two of the poems I believe to have these aspects are Trophies, The Machine and Karlsbad Caverns.

In Trophies, the lines "Its real prey/ Had skipped and escaped. So the fangs,/Blind in frustration, / Crushed your trachea, the strangled sounds" indicate this. The idea of such violent imagery is certainly a element of the horror genre. "Fangs" gives the connotations of vampires and feral animals, both of which are common themes within gothic horror. The word "crushed" suggests that the action was effortless for the killer and that the victim offered no resistance. 

So happy they didn't know they were happy,/ They were so busy with it, so full of it, / Clinging upside down in their stone heavens.

Birthday Letters  explored Hughes' complex relationship his wife, American literary poet Sylvia Plath.  The poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. Hughes was blamed for her death and released Birthday Letters a few months before his death in 1998.