Ted Hughes

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Edward James Hughes OM (17 August 1930–28 October 1998), more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.

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

In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". On 22 March 2010, it was announced that Hughes would be commemorated with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, to be installed in early 2011.

Early life
Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 at 1 Aspinal Street, in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire to William Henry and Edith (nÃ©e Farrar) Hughes and raised among the local farms of the Calder valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes' sister Olwyn was two years his senior and his brother Gerald was elder than him by ten years. Their father, William Hughes, was a carpenter, one of just 17 men of a regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915-6). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes' childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything." When Hughes was seven his family moved to Mexborough, South Yorkshire, where they ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. In Poetry in Making he recalled that he was fascinated by animals, collecting and drawing toy lead creatures. He acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats and curlews, growing up surrounded by the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors.

Hughes attended Mexborough Grammar School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, developing his interest in poetry, the last being John Fisher. Poet Harold Massingham also attended this school and was also mentored by Fisher. In 1946 one of Hughes' early poems, "Wild West" and a short story were published in the grammar school magazine The Don and Dearne, followed by further poems in 1948. During the same year Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his National Service first. His two years of National Service (1949-51) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire, a time during which he had nothing to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow".

Career
In 1951, Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M. J. C. Hodhart, an authority on balladic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodhart's supervision but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia. In his third year he transferred to anthropology and archaeology. He did not excel as a scholar. His first published poetry appeared in Chequer. A poem "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in Granta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.

After university Hughes went on to have many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a night watchman and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He also worked in a local zoo, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. On 26 February 1956, Hughes and his friends held a party to launch St. Botolph's Review, which had a single issue. In it Hughes had four poems. At the party he met the American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, having won various awards. He and Plath dated and then were married at St George the Martyr Holborn, on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest and she accompanied them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast. Reflecting later in Birthday Letters, Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers. That year they each had poems published in The Nation, Poetry and The Atlantic. Plath typed up Hughes' manuscript for his collection Hawk In The Rain which went on to win a poetry competition run by the Poetry centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. The first prize was publication by Harper and Hughes garnered critical acclaim with the book's release in September 1957. The couple moved to America so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College; during this time Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958 they met Leonard Baskin who would later illustrate many of Hughes' books, including Crow.

The couple returned to England, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing, Hughes working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews and talks. Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca (1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962) and in 1961, bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In the summer of 1962 Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under a cloud of his many affairs, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962 and she set up life in a new flat with the children.

The death of Plath
Beset by depression, and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963, although it is unclear as to whether she meant to ultimately succeed. Hughes was devastated. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Some feminists argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide. Plath's gravestone was repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone and attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath." In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name. In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent. In The Guardian on 20 April 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know." As Plath's widower, Hughes, controversially, became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1966). Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book and many feminists argued that Hughes had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy. He claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath's journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple's young children.

On 25 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas stove, Assia Wevill committed suicide in the same way. Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965. Their deaths led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.

1970-1998
In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remained together until his death. He bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and maintained the property at Court Green. He began farming a small farm near Winkleigh called Moortown, later to become embedded in the title of one of his poetry collections. He was later to become President of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh. In October 1970 Crow was published. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, following Sir John Betjeman. Hughes published many works for children and collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. He dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education, which runs residential writing courses at Hughes home at Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire.

Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. Hughes continued to live at the house in Devon, until his fatal myocardial infarction in a Southwark, London hospital on 28 October 1998, while undergoing treatment for colon cancer. His funeral was held on 3 November 1998, at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet SÃ©amus Heaney, said: "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken." A memorial walk was inaugurated in 2005, leading from the Devon village of Belstone to Hughes' memorial stone above the River Taw, on Dartmoor. On 28 April 2011, a blue memorial plaque for Hughes was unveiled at North Tawton by his wife Carol.

At Lumb Bridge near Pecket Well, Calderdale is a plaque, installed by The Elmet Trust, commemorating Hughes' poem "Six Young Men", which was inspired by an old photograph of six young men taken at that spot. The photograph, taken just before the First World War, was of six young men who were all to soon lose their lives in the war

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide on 16 March 2009 after battling depression.

Work
Hughes' first collection, 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 London Magazine, Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves' 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. HisTales 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 as 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 writer's block. 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' The White Goddess. 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 cover artwork was by their daughter Frieda. Hughes' 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.

Themes
Hughes' 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' 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 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.

Archive
Hughes archival material is held by institutions such as Emory University, Atlanta, Exeter University. The British Library also has a large collection comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries and correspondence. From 2010 the library archive will be accessible through the British Library website.

Ted Hughes Award
In 2009 the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry was established with the permission of Carol Hughes. The Poetry Society notes "the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, and one of the greatest twentieth century poets for both children and adults". Members of the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society recommend a living UK poet who has made the most new and innovative work completed that year, "highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life." The Â£5,000 prize funded from the annual honorarium that Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy receives as Laureate from The Queen.

Alice Oswald was the inaugural winner in 2010 for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers (etchings by Jessica Greenman). In 2011 judges Gillian Clarke, Stephen Raw and Jeanette Winterson awarded the award to Kaite O'Reilly for her site specific retelling of Aeschylus' play, The Persians (first produced in 472 BCE). Three other poets were shortlisted. Christopher Reid worked with director Niall MacCormick to adapt his narrative poem The Song of Lunch into a 50-minute BBC2 film. David Swann's The Privilege of Rain (published by Waterloo Press, with wood-cuts by Clare Dunne), is a collection complied following a year as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham (prison). Katharine Towers' The Floating Man is a debut collection published by Picador.

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 &mdash; 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

Volumes of translation

 * Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
 * Blood Wedding by Federico GarcÃ­a Lorca
 * 1977 Amen by Yehuda Amichai, Amen, Harper (New York, NY)
 * 1968 Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems Cape Goliard Press (London, England), revised edition published as Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.
 * 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 PhÃ¨dre 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 SÃ©amus Heaney)
 * The School Bag (edited with SÃ©amus Heaney)
 * By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember

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

Books for children

 * The Earth Owl and Other Moon-People (1960)
 * Meet my Folks! (1961)
 * How the Whale Became (1963)
 * Nessie the Mannerless Monster (1964)
 * The Iron Man (1968)
 * Coming of the Kings and Other Plays (1970)
 * Season Songs (Illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published 1976)
 * Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (Illustrated by Leonard Baskin,published 1976)
 * Moon-Bells and Other Poems (Illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers,published 1978)
 * Under the North Star (Illustrated by Leonard Baskin,published 1981)
 * Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (Illustrated by Chris Riddell,published 1986)
 * Tales of the Early World (Illustrated by Andrew Davidson published 1988)
 * The Iron Woman ( 1993)
 * Collected Animal Poems: Vols. 1–4
 * ''The Mermaid's Purse (Illustrated by R.J. Lloyd, published by Sunstone Press, 1993)
 * ''The Cat and the Cuckoo (Illustrated by R. J. Lloyd, published 1987)

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; also see below), 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 (juvenile)
 * ''The Price of a Bride (juvenile; radio play), broadcast, 1966.
 * Adapted Seneca's Oedipus (produced in London 1968)
 * Orghast produced in Persepolis, Iran, 1971.
 * Eat Crow Rainbow Press (London, England), 1971.
 * The Iron Man (based on his juvenile book; televised, 1972).
 * Orpheus 1973.

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)

Many of Ted Hughes' poems have been published as limited-edition broadsides.

Profiles

 * Poems and profile at the Poetry Archive. Retrieved 2010-08-13.
 * Poems and poetry at the Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2010-08-13
 * Poems and profile at Poets.org
 * Hughes referenced timeline. Ann Skea
 * The Elmet Trust. Official Ted Hughes website. Retrieved: 2010-02-22
 * Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London
 * Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Archive

 * British Library - modern British Collections on Ted Hughes. Retrieved: 2010-02-22
 * Ted Hughes archive at Emory University. Retrieved: 2010-02-22
 * Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections. Retrieved: 2010-02-22

Articles

 * Guardian article Son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kills himself 23 March 2009. Retrieved: 2010-02-22
 * Guardian article on Wevill and Hughes' relationship 19 October 2006. Retrieved: 2010-02-22
 * Dreaming of Foxes - an audio drama loosely based on the childhood of Ted Hughes in Mytholmroyd - online at The Independent
 * Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath's Son, Commits Suicide. Retrieved: 2011-02-23
 * The beauty and the brute article by Glenys Roberts 11 January 2007.

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