Jan 8, 2007

Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library has acquired the correspondence from Ted Hughes, the late-poet laureate of Britain, to his lover Assia Wevill.

In one letter in the collection Hughes instructs Wevill to "please burn all my letters," an instruction she obviously did not follow. The surviving correspondence begins in March 1963, continues until 1969 and "offers readers unprecedented access to Hughes' state of mind at a time of crisis in his personal and professional life," says Stephen Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

The collection includes more than 60 letters from Hughes to Wevill, six from her to him, as well as a number of notes, sketches, fragmentary diary entries and a small number of photographs of Wevill.

Wevill is remembered as the woman with whom Hughes began an affair in the summer of 1962 which led to Hughes and his wife, poet Sylvia Plath, separating. After Plath's death in the winter of 1963, Hughes and Wevill struggled to establish a new basis for their life together. Wevill debated whether to leave her own husband, poet David Wevill, and in the years that followed she and Hughes tried a variety of living arrangements, at times living together, sometimes apart. In 1965 Assia gave birth to a daughter, Shura.

Although Wevill often was erroneously described as Hughes' second wife, the couple never married, and in March 1969 Wevill tragically took her life and that of her young daughter in a manner that bore a resemblance to Plath's death.

The correspondence spans the period in Hughes' life when he was writing "Gaudete," editing Plath's "Ariel" for publication, and writing the sequence of poems based on the life of a mythical crow figure. It was during this period that Wevill and Hughes also collaborated on the translation of Yehuda Amichai's "Selected Poems" (1968).

This intimate correspondence reveals Hughes' struggle to find peace in the years after Plath's death and his sometimes tortured relationship with Wevill. "You'll see that I'll fulfill all my promises eventually," he assures her in one poignant letter. In another, written to Wevill's sister, Celia Chaikin, in the weeks after her death, Hughes confesses that their life together had been complicated by the presence of "old ghosts," but he adds, "Assia was my true wife."

"This correspondence, which joins Ted Hughes' own literary archive already at Emory, further strengthens the library's Hughes holdings and promises to add greatly to our understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century," says Enniss.