Ted Hughes

Edward James Hughes was an English poet and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation, and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He served as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Some feminists and some American admirers of Plath blamed him for her death. His last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem discovered in October 2010, Last letter, describes what happened during the three days before her death.

Work:

Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), attracted considerable critical acclaim. In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize, which brought $5,000. His most significant work is perhaps Crow (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse.

In a 1971 interview with The London Magazine, Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves's book The White Goddess and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Hughes worked for 10 years on a prose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film. It tells the story of the vicar of an English village who is carried off by elemental spirits, and replaced in the village by his enantiodromic double, a changeling, fashioned from a log, who nevertheless has the same memories as the original vicar. The double is a force of nature who organises the women of the village into a "love coven" in order that he may father a new messiah. When the male members of the community discover what is going on, they murder him. The epilogue consists of a series of lyrics spoken by the restored priest in praise of a nature goddess, inspired by Robert Graves's White Goddess. It was printed in 1977. Hughes was very interested in the relationship between his poetry and the book arts, and many of his books were produced by notable presses and in collaborative editions with artists, for instance with Leonard Baskin.

In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. His Tales from Ovid (1997) contains a selection of free verse translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses. He also wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books being The Iron Man, written to comfort his children after Sylvia Plath's suicide. It later became the basis of Pete Townshend's rock opera of the same name, and of the animated film The Iron Giant.

Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 following the death of John Betjeman. It was later known that Hughes was second choice for the appointment. Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, had declined, because of ill health and a loss of creative momentum, dying a year later. Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998. In 1992 Hughes published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a monumental work inspired by Graves's The White Goddess. The book, considered Hughes's key work of prose, had a mixed reception "divided between those who considered it an important and original appreciation of Shakespeare’s complete works, whilst others dismissed it as a lengthy and idiosyncratic appreciation of Shakespeare refracted by Hughes’s personal belief system". Hughes himself later suggested that the time spent writing prose was directly responsible for a decline in his health. Also in 1992 Hughes published Rain Charm for the Duchy, collecting together for the first time his Laureate works, including poems celebrating important royal occasions. The book also contained a section of notes throwing light on the context and genesis of each poem.

In 1998 his Tales from Ovid won the Whitbread Book Of The Year Award. In Birthday Letters, his last collection, Hughes broke his silence on Plath, detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time. The book, the cover artwork for which was by their daughter Frieda, won the 1999 Whitbread Prize for poetry.

Hughes's definitive 1,333-page Collected Poems (Faber & Faber) appeared (posthumously) in 2003. A poem discovered in October 2010, "Last letter", describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide. It was published in New Statesman on National Poetry Day, October 2010. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy told Channel 4 Newsthat the poem was "the darkest poem he has ever written" and said that for her it was "almost unbearable to read."

In 2011 several previously unpublished letters from Hughes to Craig Raine were published in the literary review Areté. They relate mainly to the process of editing Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and also contain a sequence of drafts of letters in which Raine attempts to explain to Hughes his disinclination to publish Hughes's poem The Cast in an anthology he was editing, on the grounds that it might open Hughes to further attack on the subject of Sylvia Plath. "Dear Ted, Thanks for the poem. It is very interesting and would cause a minor sensation" (4 April 1997). The poem was eventually published in Birthday Letters and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997).

Themes:

Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar".

The West Riding dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.

Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian and ecological viewpoint. He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.

Poetry collections:

1957 The Hawk in the Rain
1960 Lupercal
1967 Wodwo
1970 Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow
1972 Selected Poems 1957–1967
1975 Cave Birds
1977 Gaudete
1979 Remains of Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin)
1979 Moortown
1983 River
1986 Flowers and Insects
1989 Wolfwatching
1992 Rain-charm for the Duchy
1994 New Selected Poems 1957–1994
1997 Tales from Ovid
1998 Birthday Letters — winner of the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 1999 British Book of the Year award.
2003 Collected Poems
2016 A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Poems

Volumes of translation:

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca
1968 Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems Cape Goliard Press (London, England), revised edition published as Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.
1977 Amen by Yehuda Amichai, Amen, Harper (New York, NY)
1989 The Desert of Love: Selected Poems, by János Pilinszky, Anvil Press Poetry (Greenwich, UK)
1997 Tales from Ovid by Ovid Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)
1999 The Oresteia by Aeschylus, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)
1999 Phèdre by Jean Racine, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)
1999 Alcestis by Euripides, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)

Anthologies edited by Hughes:

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath
Selected Verse of Shakespeare
A Choice of Coleridge's Verse
The Rattle Bag (edited with Seamus Heaney)
The School Bag (edited with Seamus Heaney)
By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember
Modern Poetry in Translation

Short story collection:

1995 The Dreamfighter, and Other Creation Tales, Faber and Faber, London, England.
1995 Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories, Picador, New York, NY.

Prose:

1967 Poetry Is, Doubleday, New York.
1967 Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from "Listening and Writing, Faber and Faber, London.
1992, revised and corrected 1993 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
1993 A Dancer to God Tributes to T. S. Eliot. (Ed) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
1994 Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, (essay collection) Edited by William Scammell, Faber and Faber (London), Picador USA (New York) 1995.

Books for children:

1961 Meet my Folks! (illustrated by George Adamson)
1963 How the Whale Became (illustrated by George Adamson)
1963 The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People (illustrated by R.A. Brandt)
1964 Nessie the Mannerless Monster (illustrated by Gerald Rose)
1967 Poetry in the Making
1968 The Iron Man (first illustrated by George Adamson and in 1985 by Andrew Davidson)
1970 Coming of the Kings and Other Plays
1976 Season Songs (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
1976 Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
1978 Moon-Bells and Other Poems (illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers)
1981 Under the North Star (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
1984 What is the Truth? (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd), for which Hughes won the Guardian Prize
1986 Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (illustrated by Chris Riddell)
1987 The Cat and the Cuckoo (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd)
1988 Tales of the Early World (illustrated by Andrew Davidson)
1993 The Iron Woman (illustrated by Andrew Davidson)
1993 The Mermaid's Purse (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd, Sunstone Press)
1995 Collected Animal Poems: Vols. 1–4, Faber & Faber

Plays:

The House of Aries (radio play), broadcast, 1960.
The Calm produced in Boston, MA, 1961.
A Houseful of Women (radio play), broadcast, 1961.
The Wound (radio play), broadcast, 1962.
Difficulties of a Bridegroom (radio play), broadcast, 1963.
Epithalamium produced in London, 1963.
Dogs (radio play), broadcast, 1964.
The House of Donkeys (radio play), broadcast, 1965.
The Head of Gold (radio play), broadcast, 1967.
The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays (jbased on juvenile work).
The Price of a Bride (juvenile, radio play), broadcast, 1966.
Adapted Seneca's Oedipus, produced in London, 1968).
Orghast (with Peter Brook), produced in Persepolis, Iran, 1971.
Eat Crow, Rainbow Press, London, England, 1971.
The Iron Man, juvenile, televised, 1972.
Orpheus, 1973.

Letters:

Letters of Ted Hughes, 2007.
Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, 2012.

Limited Editions:

The Burning of the Brothel (Turret Books, 1966)
Recklings (Turret Books, 1967)
Scapegoats and Rabies (Poet & Printer, 1967)
Animal Poems (Richard Gilbertson, 1967)
A Crow Hymn (Sceptre Press, 1970)
The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar (Richard Gilbertson, 1970)
Crow Wakes (Poet & Printer, 1971)
Shakespeare's Poem (Lexham Press, 1971)
Eat Crow (Rainbow Press, 1971)
Prometheus on His Crag (Rainbow Press, 1973)
Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow (Illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Faber & Faber, 1973)
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (Rainbow Press,1974)
Cave Birds (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Scolar Press, 1975)
Earth-Moon (illustrated by Ted Hughes, published by Rainbow Press, 1976)
Eclipse (Sceptre Press, 1976)
Sunstruck (Sceptre Press, 1977)
A Solstice (Sceptre Press, 1978)
Orts (Rainbow Press, 1978)
Moortown Elegies (Rainbow Press, 1978)
The Threshold (illustrated by Ralph Steadman, published by Steam Press, 1979)
Adam and the Sacred Nine (Rainbow Press, 1979)
Four Tales Told by an Idiot (Sceptre Press, 1979)
The Cat and the Cuckoo (illustrated by R.J. Lloyd, published by Sunstone Press, 1987)
A Primer of Birds: Poems (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1989)
Capriccio (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1990)
The Mermaid's Purse (illustrated by R.J. Lloyd, published by Sunstone Press, 1993)
Howls and Whispers (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1998)