Ariel's gift
Subtitle: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of the Birthday letters
By: Erica Wagner
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780393020090
Subjects: Birthday letters; Marriage; In literature; Marriage in literature; Poets in literature
Description: "When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, and immediately landed on the best-seller list. Few suspected that Ted Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on a cycle of poems addressed almost entirely to his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath.".

"In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner explores the powerful and destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, pointing the reader toward the events that shaped them, and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Sylvia Plath's own work."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Originally published: London : Faber and Faber, 2000.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-292 and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the Ecstasy of Influence --; title: "A Crush of Diamonds" --; title: "Beautiful, Beautiful America!" --; title: "Spain was the Land of Your Dreams" --; title: "That Home was Our First Camp" --; title: "What Happens in the Heart Simply Happens" --; title: "Right Across America We Went Looking for You" --; title: "I Let That Fox Cub Go" --; title: "Then the Script Overtook Us" --; title: "The Cave of Thunder" --; title: "The Shock of Her Words From Nowhere" --; title: "The Jewel You Lost was Blue".