The British Library has acquired hundreds of poems, letters and notebooks of former British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Many of them concern his final collection, the Birthday Letters, which address his marriage to Silvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963.
Drafts and notes reveal he worked on the collection for more than 25 years.
Jamie Andrews from the British Library said the archive "would change Hughes scholarship in a substantial way".
"Anyone compiling a complete collection of his poems will need to examine this collection," added Andrews, who is the library's head of modern literature manuscripts.
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His dense scrawls clutter the pages like brambles, as scraps of ideas and abandoned verses reveal his ongoing struggle to come to terms with Plath's death.
Many of the unpublished works were apparently too personal to have been aired during Hughes' lifetime, with one poem starkly stating:
You were the tailor of your own murder
Which imprisoned you
And since I was your nurse and protector
That sentence was mine, too
"The rawness of the poems certainly makes them a lot less guarded than what became Birthday Letters, which he very carefully ordered to create the idea of a narrative," notes Andrews.
This is a very important collection: we are glad the British Library has it so it can be studied for generations.
