‘These super people’ : the superimposition of Ted Hughes’ ‘Brasilia’ on Sylvia Plath’s ‘Brasilia’

Abstract

When Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters was published in 1998, only months before the poet’s death, the volume came as such a surprise that it made headlines in both England and America. To readers hungry for biographical revelation, it seemed as though Hughes was finally offering a confessional account of his lifelong association with Sylvia Plath. But a careful examination of these poems indicates that Hughes’ intentions are not uncomplicatedly or ingenuously autobiographical. Hughes assesses, appropriates, and recalibrates Plath’s mythically charged poetic oeuvre to mould his own myth, and does so in a manner that echoes the way Plath appropriates his work when she writes the Ariel poems. In fact, Birthday Letters is simultaneously Hughes’ last volume of poetry and the last instance of the poetic dialogue between the two poets. Though Birthday Letters is saturated with references to Plath’s poetry, many poems go beyond incidental allusion to address specific ones by Plath, some of them even sharing titles. This article examines Plath’s ‘Brasilia’ and Hughes’ ‘Brasilia’ as poems that, together, represent an exemplary instance of the Hughes-Plath textual exchange. Neither of these poems has been analyzed closely in existing scholarship. Plath’s poem envisions the emergence of a race of ‘super-people,’ inhuman figures who present a threat to the speaker’s child. Hughes’ poem superimposes another vision onto Plath’s ‘Brasilia’: a resurrected Plath herself, an immortal literary icon who becomes the super-human threatening those left behind in the wake of her death.