The publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters showed modern poetry at its least resistant to the mass media. The long attention given to the Hughes/Plath marriage guaranteed the book widespread publicity, the idea that the poet would be personal and sincere proving immensely attractive to critical pundits and readers alike. Not only that, the book could be reckoned much more ‘accessible’ than the Hughes/Plath poems of old. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with much of the poetry of the 1960s and ’70s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems’ artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored. In mitigation, it can be pointed out how a long narrative sequence does not require the same level of intensity as a lyric and that readability is not actually a fault. Still, Birthday Letters reads much better the first time than it ever will again and, read in isolation, few of its poems particularly reward the time spent with them.

Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets’ marriage and to the intrusion of others’ biographical speculation about that marriage. There is a continuing poetic rivalry. But Hughes does not just revisit Plath; he revisits his young self. Not only has the older Hughes seen the virtue of the qualities of prose in poetry, in other respects too, he appears to have joined up with Robert Conquest and the Movement. Suddenly all the old criticisms the straightened and war-bitten generation levelled at his own verse are levelled at Plath and hers. ‘Your Paris’ has Plath quite unaware of the recent occupation and of ‘each bullet scar’ in the stone work, unlike her post-war British husband.