Grief Representation in Late Poetry: Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912–13” and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters

An experience that frequently accompanies the process of growing older is the loss of a loved one, particularly one’s life partner. Whereas the (spousal) grief memoir has become a prominent form for expressing the isolating experience of dying in modernity that constitutes a privatized response toward grieving, poetry—as the traditional form of literary elegy—has been less in the focus of contemporary grief analyses. As this chapter illustrates, the connection between late poetry, closure, and the reshaping of elegiac traditions promises insights into this devastating experience, since writers may provide new insights, modes of reflection, imagery, and creative responses to aging and grief. I will compare Thomas Hardy’s sequence of “Poems of 1912–13” (1914), written in response to the death of his first wife, Emma, with Ted Hughes’s last poetry collection, Birthday Letters (1998), in which he revisits the 1963 suicide of his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. While both marriages have been conflicted, the poetry can be read, in Hardy’s case, as a reshaping of traditional elegy that formulates a logic of grief in a post-Darwinian universe, and, in Hughes’s case, as a parahistorical and creative rewriting of death, mourning, and grief in the late twentieth century.