Conflicting perspectives are different points of view expressed and influenced by ones context and values. “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes is an anthology of poems challenging the accusation that he was responsible for his wife, Sylvia Plath’s death. We are viewing or possibly representing an issue, incident or event from a particular point of view.
This article is evaluating the representation of events and personalities in whether the composers are being biased or unbiased.
“The minotaur’ written by Ted Hughes opens with violent action. There are two personalities on whom the focus is within the poem, the focal point is the action and dialogue between Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is represented as being somewhat violent and crazy, smashing Hughes’s mother’s heirloom sideboard. I find that Hughes ties her anger and violence to her personality rather than to his tardiness, sarcastically suggesting that she fails to include these emotions and destructive tendencies in her poetry.
Hughes paints himself as the calm, placid one encouraging her in her creative pursuits, “get that shoulder under your stanzas and we’ll be away”.
Where as ‘pursuit’ by Sylvia Plath is conflicting towards ‘the minotaur’ almost saying that Ted Hughes was actually the violent one saying in the poem “He prowls more loudly than the sun”, “advancing always at my back”. It also seems like she’s trying to say that he had a big ego, his poems were better then her’s but he always was trying to push her to write with her emotions like the way she expressed herself when she got angry.
‘Fulbright Scohlars’ also written by Ted Hughes describes where Hughes as a young man saw a photograph of the new Fulbright scholars. We see the day through the eyes of Hughes and are taken back into time through flashbacks of his memory. Does Hughes faulty memory influence his perspective of the truth?
He is so unsure of what actually happened on that day, whether what he remembers is actual or...