Independent Bath Literary Festival

Winter solstice: the longest, darkest night of the year. How better to spend it than with a top soprano, a theatrical knight, and six viols, and where better than in the soft blue gloom of Kings Place? All came with promising baggage: the Fretwork ensemble had just released a remarkable viol-arrangement of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations'; Clare Wilkinson had dazzled us a few days previously with her a cappella exploits with I Fagiolini; and Sir Tom Courtenay – well, we knew where he was coming from. Fretwork would provide instrumental music, Courtenay would give us poems.

A collection of 44 drawings by the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) never previously exhibited in this country go on show at the Mayor Gallery in London tomorrow. The sketches were given to Plath's daughter, the artist Frieda Hughes, by her poet father and Plath's former husband Ted before he died.

On Tuesday night Rhodri Marsden tweeted about a terrible date in 2002. It led to hundreds of his 15,000 Twitter followers sharing theirs online. Here are some of the best @ replies

Look away now, all of you who thought that SMOG was an acronym for a society of geeks called the Secret Masters of Gaming.

Jean Hartley, the Yorkshire housewife who discovered the poems of Philip Larkin, has died aged 78.

Silence is golden for a perfectionist

Experience is no insurance against grief

As Beat fans await the new Allen Ginsberg biopic, Kevin Jackson recites an elegy for the tragic history of poetry on film

The newly discovered poem by Ted Hughes on the death of his wife Sylvia Plath is a private, raw affair

Last Letter has been revealed, but is it what he would have wanted

Ted Hughes's poem "Last Letter", newly discovered in the British Library, is a shattering piece of work. Not because it's the first piece of writing in which he addressed the circumstances of Sylvia Plath's suicide. Not because it tracks through the last three days of her unhappy life on earth. Not even because it's a great poem, although it has moments of Parnassian brilliance. What makes it an emotionally draining experience is the tension it embodies, between what the angry, distraught, bewildered husband Ted Hughes wants to say about his wife's final hours, and what the cool, judicious, focused poet Ted Hughes will allow himself to say about them for posterity. Wordsworth said poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquillity". I don't believe I've ever read a poem in which emotion was so obviously recollected in anguish and turmoil, barely contained by the formal requirements of line, sense and rhythm.

Those who enjoy "new" works from old artistic masters are being rather spoiled at the moment. This week they have had a previously unpublished poem by Ted Hughes on the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Meanwhile, a lost concerto score by Vivaldi has turned up in Scotland.

A previously unpublished poem has been discovered in which the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes recalls the day in which he is told: "Your wife is dead."