Ted Hughes's publication of Birthday Letters in January, 1998, was portrayed in the press and reviews as breaking a 35-year silence on his wife Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963. What made this volume of poems a best-seller was its confessional and biographical drama. Hughes addresses his dead spouse and returns to all of the major events in their shared life, simultaneously exposing his feelings and intuitions about what went wrong in their marriage and why Plath was driven to take her life. Less evident to the general reading public was that Birthday Letters extends a dialogue between Plath and Hughes on the nature of poetry and poetic identity that began in their courtship. Plath felt that Hughes initiated her into a strong feminine voice, and she, in turn, was responsible for introducing the young British Hughes's work to an American audience. Many of Plath's Ariel poems are written on the reverse side of Hughes's poems and are often in heated exchange with them; Hughes was the editor of Plath's posthumous publications and could be said to have `authored' Ariel because of his power over selecting poems for this volume; in addition, Hughes has written several critical assessments of Plath's work that presume final authority on how her work should be understood and received. Birthday Letters, with its frequent borrowing of titles and images from Plath's poems and its revisiting of incidents she describes in her letters, journals, and fiction, prolongs a conversation and collaboration between two poets that began in 1956 and may still be heard whenever they are read together. This tutorial will explore the Plath-Hughes marriage, both biographically and poetically. Topics may include: the conflict between Plath's confessional sensibility and Hughes's modernist aesthetic and questions about the literary merits of baring one's soul; the role of biography generally in literary interpretation; the controversies surrounding posthumous publication of Plath's work; and the extent to which some of Hughes's final publications constitute `having the last word' on both personal and poetic disagreements with his dead wife. Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week; they will write a 5- to 7-page paper every other week, and comment on their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be on developing skills not only in reading poetic texts, but also in constructing critical arguments and cogently responding to them in written and oral critiques. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limited to 10. (Criticism or Post-1900)