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     It seems to have gone unnoticed in the UK that in spring 1997 Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia bought, for an undisclosed sum, the entire collection of Ted Hughes’s papers – all 2.5 tons of manuscripts, notebooks and letters. The 86 boxes containing the definitive archive of the poet were expected to take two years to catalogue, Stephen Enniss, Curator of Literary Collections told me at the time, but processing is still ongoing. “Some portions of the collection can be made available to scholars now”, Steve told me recently.

     The news of this acquisition broke as I was about to return to Bretton Hall College after a semester teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina. So fellow Hughes scholar at L-R, Rand Brandes, suggested we drive to Atlanta to get a sense of what this archive contained. Steve Enniss had very kindly offered to display a sample of the material for us to see.

     After four and a half hours on the road I was in the Woodruff Library at Emory handling a scrapbook in which Sylvia Plath had pasted documents of her husband’s first successes – telegrams from Faber and Faber accepting The Hawk in the Rain for publication forty years ago, a note of congratulations from T. S. Eliot, a receipt of the $63 payment for the first publication of the poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, the cover of the New Yorker in which it appeared.

     There is also sad evidence of Plath’s manic behaviour towards the end of their relationship. Some of the handwritten drafts of poems are burnt around the edges, relics presumably of the fire in which she tried to destroy Hughes’s work. A typewritten manuscript page from her novel of mental breakdown, The Bell Jar, has been used on the reverse side for a handwritten poem by Hughes called ‘Digging’. This is one of hundreds of unpublished poems here. It has been torn in two places and taped back together. In his inventory for the papers Hughes wrote, “Torn by S.P. and repaired”.

     The range of unseen material in this collection will keep Hughes scholars busy for years to come. There’s an unpublished comic poem for the Queen Mother “about her dream”. There are four pages of notes to the Arts Council about how to improve sales of poetry. There’s a box full of material relating to Hughes’s complaint to the Press Council about Ronald Hayman’s biography of Plath and letters correcting other biographers. One Quinton Christopher, who was a six-year-old boy from St Bees Village School in 1969 when he sent a poem in to a competition judged by Hughes, might be amused to know that the reverse side of his pink paper was the first of four sheets used to plan one of the major poetic works of the twentieth century, Crow.

     Some of the personal correspondence is closed for 25 years, but the letters between Hughes and Heaney “might be viewed 100 years from now”, says Steve Enniss, “like the correspondence between Wordsworth and Coleridge”. Professor of Modern English and Irish literature at Emory, Ronald Schuchard, says “it will help us hire new lecturers in the field who will have at their fingertips material that will launch their scholarly careers”. The Hughes papers join those of the Irish poets Yeats, Longley, Muldoon. Emory also has a small collection from Seamus Heaney, although he has not yet made his complete collection of papers available.

     So why did the Hughes collection go to America and not to Leeds or Sheffield universities? The answer is quite simply that in 1979 Emory was given $105 million in Coca-Cola stock which has been used to build a collection of manuscripts from contemporary poets. When I entered Schuchard’s office he was going through the catalogue of a London book dealer ticking his next purchases.

     Hughes was quoted in an Atlanta newspaper as saying that his papers “could not be at a better place nor in more congenial company”. But there may have been two further reasons why he was happy to have his papers in America. In the USA Hughes has, as the American Hughes scholar Len Scigaj put it, “been skewered by the American feminists as being the person who killed Sylvia Plath, and that is in no way accurate”. Consequently, there has been little interest in his work there. Now it is clear that the future compilation of the Complete Poems and the Collected Letters will require much time spent in America. Everything is in place for a Hughes revival in American academia. Emory is planning to offer scholarships to fund the study of the Hughes collection as an extension of the two currently available for work on their Irish material.

     Secondly, his reputation in the USA deprived him of the pot of gold that American universities have delivered to Seamus Heaney. This sale might have gone some way towards compensation for that. But the loss to Britain is sad. The fact is that British universities have been too aloof to seek the kind of private and corporate endowments that gave Emory its purchasing power. In a recent TLS article Ferdinand Mount indicated that money is available to purchase papers for the nation, but that either university libraries or authors are unaware of it. “In the case of the Hughes papers, for example,” Mount writes, “the dealer involved had already been rebuffed by the Heritage Lottery Fund in his efforts to secure Alan Sillitoe’s papers for Nottingham” (TLS 9.4.99). Mount suggests, however, that the sums available would not even have approached Emory’s offer.

     In 1996 Hughes’s contemporary at Cambridge, Peter Redgrove, deposited his papers at Sheffield University where Neil Roberts teaches, the first person to write a monograph on Redgrove’s work. This option was always open to Hughes, although he’d have taken a lot less money. But were any British universities seriously interested in raising the money to keep this major twentieth-century archive in the UK? More recently Emory have added to their Hughes archive his letters to Lucas Myers from 1955 to 1968, and 400 manuscript drafts of poems from the late 1950s and early 1960s. All this later material was in private hands and thus not previously available for study. The result is that future Hughes scholars will be going to Atlanta and swallowing the power of Coca Cola. Certainly there could be no better place for their conservation, and future collections of Hughes material will now join the original 2.5 tons from Devon. It may be an advantage to scholars to have all the material in one place for the work that is to come.

     Steve Enniss can be e-mailed at [email protected]