This paper examines Ted Hughes`s last collection, Birthday Letters, which is read here as displaying a different portrait of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. It is generally known that Plath suffered emotional torment during her complicated married life, largely because of Hughes` philandering. But in Birthday Letters Hughes frankly records his fond memories of her and their troubled relationship, and this collection can be read as a source which sheds new light on the marriage of two poets. Doubtless, it was Hughes` behaviors that caused the break-down of this relationship, but it can also be speculated that Plath was either too sensitive or too ambitious for her literary career to be content with being a famous poet`s wife. After all, Birthday Letters makes a frank confession of a guilty husband and at the same time constitutes a fine collection of poems that bear the signature of two competing poetic souls.