Smash hit

Other poems proved too difficult to complete. Hughes repeatedly tried to compose a poem about his reaction to seeing the book jacket of a new edition of The Bell Jar, but his notebook shows that he struggled to find the words. The Book Jacket, which includes lines about Plath holding a long-stemmed rose, was never published.

The archive contains many insights into Hughes beyond the raw material for Birthday Letters. Scholars, who will be given access to the archive in late 2009, will also discover unpublished poems about Hughes’s friends.

There is a complete poem about Hughes’s friend Peter Brook, the theatre director with whom he collaborated in the 1960s. He describes the director’s eyes as being like a gull’s, “happy as the sea, infinite into death, infinite into life”.

Other highlights include working drafts and pages of detailed thoughts and reflections relating to Capriccio, Hughes’s volume of poems about Assia Wevill, his mistress who also killed herself as well as their child.

Times Archive, 1970: Ted Hughes, a brutal metamorphosis

The human world is presented essentially as a place of adult carrion

Related Links

• Why the Ted Hughes archive should remain in Britain

The collection contains drafts and notes for further Crow poems that Hughes was working on and poetical drafts stretching over his entire career.

The poet’s personal diaries span the 1950s to the 1990s, recording daily events, dreams and reflections on his family and his past.

Hughes’s fishing journals contain lengthy reflections inspired by locations like Devon, where he lived for many years, Scotland, Alaska, and Kenya, among other fishing haunts.

There is also correspondence with literary figures such as Seamus Heaney and Andrew Motion.

Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the post for 14 years until his death at the age of 68 in 1998.

The collection has been bought with a £200,000 grant from the Shaw Fund, and donations from Friends of the National Libraries and Friends of the British Library.

Carol Hughes said that she believed the British Library to be an ideal home for the archive. “Ted was a man of these islands, their landscapes, rivers and wild places, and it is fitting that papers covering such an important part of his creative life should be deposited with such a prestigious institution here in Britain,” she said.

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