A school jotter marked "Histry" in a child’s handwriting seems an unlikely place to find early drafts of one of the bestselling poetry books ever published.

The buff-coloured exercise book still bears the marks of its first owner, a schoolboy at Vicars Hill School in Boldre, Hampshire, but inside the covers a different handwriting sprawls across the pages.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, recycled old school books as notepads and used P. Hunt’s unwanted history jotter to order his thoughts about Syliva Plath, his first wife, who killed herself aged 31.

The book, which has previously only been seen by close family members, will soon become available to scholars as part of Hughes’s archive, which has been deposited at the British Library.

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Carol Hughes, the poet’s widow, sold the archive in a £500,000 deal that will allow scholars to pore over more than 220 files and boxes of manuscripts that show Hughes’s working methods in minute detail.

The archive also features unpublished poems, letters, journals and even fishing diaries, 90 per cent in the author’s spidery handwriting.

Documents such as P. Hunt’s school book show that Hughes not only remembered his late wife fondly, but with an almost obsessive passion. It took him 30 years of writing and re-writing before he summoned the will to make the poems public.

Hughes’s relief when he finally published Birthday Letters is palpable in letters included in the archive. He wrote to Kathleen Raine, his friend and fellow poet, that he could not bear to keep silent any longer. “I had always thought [the poems] unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable,” he wrote. “But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer. How strange that we have to make a public declaration of our secrets.”

In another exercise book, which Hughes bought in bulk from Vicars Hill School in Boldre, Hampshire, he lists memories of Plath that he would later make the subject of his poems. He writes as if his late wife were the reader. The 30th point in his list reads: “Your death — providing other people with life.”

His 31st idea for a poem is: “How they built the mausoleum.”

The pages also include spider diagrams showing themes he thought important to Plath’s life, such as the electric shock therapy she underwent for her depression, the publication of her poetry anthology The Bell Jar, jealousy, “being Christlike” and “You as traitor, tall-teller”.

The books, which are filled with crossings-out and corrections, show how Hughes repeatedly tinkered with phrases until he was happy. A stone that he threw at a window at Newnham College, Cambridge, which he erroneously believed to be Plath’s room, later became a “soil-clod” in his poem The Visit.

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