SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

A series of deeply personal unpublished poems by Ted Hughes has been discovered and will be auctioned at Sotheby’s next week.

The previously unseen poems were written shortly after the poet’s partner, Assia Wevill, killed herself and their daughter, Shura, in 1969, six years after the suicide of Hughes’s first wife Sylvia Plath.

The poetry, handwritten in Hughes’s notebook, is a mixture of short fragments and more complete drafts of poems. There are four poems at the end of the series that seem to be more “finished”, which Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s books specialist, believes to be some of the “most direct” work Hughes produced about his emotional state. These poems clearly express his grief for Wevill and Shura, with one poem directly addressed to his daughter. “You were too young to know about death …” reads one line, while another section, addressed to Wevill, asks: “When you were thinking / You wanted to kill yourself why …”

Heaton said he thinks the series was Hughes’s way of putting “some shape on to these events, by expressing himself in poetry, which is of course the way that he naturally expressed himself.”

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