Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes, one of the giants of twentieth-century British poetry, was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. After serving in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archeology and anthropology and took a special interest in myths and legends. In 1956, he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who encouraged him to submit his manuscript to a first-book contest run by the Poetry Center. Awarded first prize by judges Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, The Hawk in the Rain (Faber & Faber, 1957) secured Hughes’s reputation as a poet of international stature. According to poet and critic Robert B. Shaw, 

Hughes’s poetry signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk too much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style. By contrast, Hughes marshaled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythic and elemental.

Hughes’s long career included unprecedented best-selling volumes such as Lupercal (Faber & Faber, 1960), Crow (Faber & Faber, 1970), Selected Poems 1957–1981 (Faber & Faber, 1982), and Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998), as well as many beloved children’s books, including The Iron Man (Faber & Faber, 1968), which was adapted as The Iron Giant (1999). With Seamus Heaney, he edited the popular anthologies The Rattle Bag (Faber & Faber, 1982) and The School Bag (Faber & Faber, 1997). Hughes was named executor of Plath’s literary estate and he edited several volumes of her work. Hughes also translated works from classical authors, including Ovid and Aeschylus. Hughes was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1984, a post he held until his death in 1998. Among his many awards, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of Britain’s highest honors.

The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a lasting influence on his work. To read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature, especially by animals. This holds true for nearly all of his books, from The Hawk in the Rain to Wolfwatching (Faber & Faber, 1989) and Moortown Diary (Faber & Faber, 1989), two of his late collections. Hughes’s love of animals was one of the catalysts in his decision to become a poet. According to TheTimes contributor Thomas Nye,

[Hughes] began writing poems in adolescence, when it dawned upon him that his earlier passion for hunting animals in his native Yorkshire ended either in the possession of a dead animal, or at best a trapped one. He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow.

However, Hughes’s interest in animals was generally less naturalistic than symbolic. Using figures such as “Crow” to approximate a mythic everyman, Hughes’s work speaks to his concern with poetry’s divinatory and shamanic powers. Working in sequences and lists, Hughes frequently uncovered a kind of autochthonous, yet literary, English language. According to Peter Davison in the New York Times,

While inhabiting the bodies of creatures, mostly male, Hughes clambers back down the evolutionary chain. He searches deep into the riddles of language, too, those that precede any given tongue, language that reeks of the forest or even the jungle. Such poems often contain a touch—or more than a touch—of melodrama, of the brutal tragedies of Seneca that Hughes adapted for the modern stage.

Hughes’s posthumous publications include Selected Poems, 1957–1994 (Faber & Faber, 2001), an updated and expanded version of the original 1982 edition, and Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 2007), edited by Christopher Reid. According to David Orr in the New York Times, Hughes’s 

letters are immediately interesting and accessible to third parties to whom they aren’t addressed.… Hughes can turn out a memorable description (biographies of Plath are “a perpetual smoldering in the cellar for us. There’s always one or two smoking away”), and his offhand observations about poetry can be startlingly perceptive.

The publication of Hughes’s Collected Poems (Faber and Faber,2003) provided new insights into Hughes’s writing process. Sean O’Brien in the Guardian noted that “Hughes conducted more than one life as a poet.” Hughes also released a large amount of work through small presses and magazines. These poems were frequently not collected, and it seems Hughes thought of his small-press efforts as experiments to see if the poems deserved placement in collections. O’Brien continues,

Clearly [Hughes] needed to be writing all the time, and many of the hitherto uncollected poems have the provisional air of resting for a moment before being taken to completion—except that half the time completion didn’t occur and wasn’t even the issue … as far as the complete body of work went, Hughes seems to have been more interested in process than outcome.

Hughes’sreputation during his lifetime was negatively affected by the suicide of Sylvia Plath in 1963 and, in 1969, the suicide of his partner, Assia Wevill, who also took the life of their young daughter, Shura. As Plath’s executor, Hughes’s decision to destroy her final diary and his refusal of publication rights to her poems angered many in the literary community. Hughes’s unpopular decisions regarding Plath’s writings, over which he had total control after her death, were often defended by him as a defense of his family’s privacy. The mental health of the Plath and Hughes family was fraught beyond Plath’s death; Nicholas Hughes, Ted Hughes’s son with Plath, suffered from depression and killed himself in 2009.

For many years after her death, Hughes refused to discuss his marriage to Plath. Thus it was with great surprise that, in 1998, the literary world received Hughes’s intimate portrait of his relationship with Plath in the form of Birthday Letters, a collection of poems covering every aspect of their relationship. The collection received both critical praise and censure; Hughes’s desire to break the silence around Plath’s death was welcomed, even as the poems themselves were scrutinized. Despite reservations, Katha Pollitt wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Hughes’s tone, “emotional, direct, regretful, entranced—pervades the book’s strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and conversational. Plath is always ‘you’—as though an old man were leafing through an album with a ghost.”

Hughes married Carol Orchard in 1970, and the couple lived on a small farm in Devon until his death. His forays into translations, essays, and criticism were noted for their intelligence and range. Hughes continued writing and publishing poems until his death from cancer on October 28, 1998. A memorial to Hughes in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey was unveiled in 2011.