Conflicting Perspectives - Fulbright Scholars

Conflicting Perspectives - Fulbright Scholars

Conflicting perspectives explore the subjective truth of an individual. Each person’s version of truth, in events, personalities and situations differ based on positive and negative experiences that one can encounter. “Fulbright Scholars” a poem from Birthday Letters Chronology by Ted Hughes, describes a day in London where Hughes as a young man saw a photograph of the new Fulbright scholars, and the day he first noticed Sylvia Plath, whom in which comes to be his wife. We see the day through the eyes of Hughes and are taken back into time through flashbacks of his memory. Hughes creates tension within the poem through conveying what he remembers to what he has since learned. The poem comes to be seen as highly subjective; therefore the different perspectives of past and present create conflict, in Hughes faulty memory.
The poem begins with a rhetorical question, which sets up the tension between the past and present memory. “Where was it in the Strand?” The reference to “the Strand” creates an allusion on a literal level ,the photograph of the “Fulbright Scholars” he first seen was in a street in London known as the Strand,   however figuratively evokes emotions of being stranded – alone in the crossroads of life. The young Hughes sees nothing but a photograph where as the old Hughes looks beyond the surface to reminisce the significant time he spent with his wife Sylvia Plath. This poem portrays that perspectives change with time showing how his feelings then, are contrasted with his feelings later –now, this creates conflicting perspectives of the past and present leaving a sense of ambiguity in Hughes mind, and the impression of the distance between the two.
Hughes makes reference to Plath’s problems, implying her “exaggerated American grin “as false, having a purpose of its own. The content Plath was there for the “cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners”, the extended metaphor suggesting the intrinsic connection...