Ted Hughes

For the Canadian judge, see Ted Hughes (judge).

Ted Hughes
File:Ted-Hughes-March1993.jpg
Born	(1930-08-17)17 August 1930 Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, England
Died	(1998-10-28)28 October 1998 (age 68) London, England
Cause of death	Myocardial infarction (heart attack)
Known for	Poet Laureate

1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, where Ted Hughes was born.

Edward James Hughes OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer, known as Ted Hughes. 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. She committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. Hughes himself never publicly entered the debate, but his last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. To some, it put him in a significantly better light whereas, to others, it seemed a failed attempt to deflect blame from himself and onto a neurotic father fixation he ascribed to Plath.

Ted Hughes also created coronation street it became a great succes and was watched all over the country

Personal life and death

Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. At this time his first published poetry appeared in the journal he started with fellow students, St. Botolph's Review, and at a party to launch the magazine he met Sylvia Plath. He and Plath married at St George the Martyr Holborn on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met.

Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca and Nicholas Farrar, but separated in the autumn of 1962. He continued to live at Court Green, North Tawton, Devon irregularly with his lover Assia Wevill after Plath's death on 11 February 1963. As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1966). He also 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 March 25 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 March 3, 1965.

In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remained together until his death. He received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II just before he died.

Hughes continued to live at the house in Devon, until his fatal myocardial infarction in a London hospital on 28 October 1998, while undergoing treatment for colon cancer. His funeral was held at North Tawton church, and he was cremated at Exeter.

Seamus Heaney, speaking at Ted Hughes' funeral, in North Tawton on 3 November 1998, 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 from the Devon village of Belstone to Hughes' memorial stone above the River Taw was inaugurated in 2005 on land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. The granite memorial is somewhat controversial locally; according to some sources, it was airlifted into place on the moors using Prince Charles' helicopter, an honour not afforded to any other Devon figure.

Hughes' son with Plath, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide on March 16, 2009 after battling depression.

Writings

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. A classic example is the poem "Hawk Roosting."

His later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, and ecological viewpoint. 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 acclaimed also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what appears to be simple verse. 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 conists 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 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.

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.

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 after Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, declined, because of ill health and writer's block. Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998. In 1993 his monumental work inspired by Graves' The White Goddess was published. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is considered to be a unique work among Shakespeare studies. His definitive 1,333-page Collected Poems (Faber & Faber) appeared in 2003.

In popular culture

In 2003, he was portrayed by British actor Daniel Craig in Sylvia, a biographical film of Sylvia Plath.

Works

Poetry

• 1957 — The Hawk in the Rain
• 1960 — Lupercal
• 1967 — Wodwo
• 1967 — Recklings
• 1970 — Crow
• 1975 — Cave Birds
• 1977 — Gaudete
• 1979 — Moortown Diary
• 1979 — Remains of Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin)
• 1981 — Mooses
• 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

Translations

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus
• Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
• Oedipus by Seneca
• Spring Awakening by Wedekind
• Blood Wedding by Lorca
• Phedre by Racine
• Alcestis by Euripides

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) ISBN 0-571-11976-X
• The School Bag (edited with Seamus Heaney)
• By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember
• The Mays

Prose

• A Dancer to God
• Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
• Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose
• Difficulties of a Bridegroom
• Poetry in the Making

Books for Children

• How the Whale Became
• Meet my Folks!
• The Earth Owl and Other Moon-people
• Nessie the Mannerless Monster
• The Coming of the Kings
• The Iron Man
• Moon Whales
• Poetry Is ISBN 0-385-03477-6
• Season Songs
• Under the North Star
• Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth
• Tales of the Early World
• The Iron Woman
• The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales
• Collected Animal Poems: Vols. 1–4
• The Mermaid's Purse
• The Cat and the Cockoos

Compositions with words by Ted Hughes

• Paul Crabtree: Songs at Year's End. Vier Gesänge nach Gedichten von Ted Hughes. for five-part mixed choir a cappella. Berlin 2006. (There came a Day; The Seven Sorrows; Snow and Snow; The Warm and the Cold)

Archive

• In addition to material held by other institutions including Emory University, Atlanta and Exeter University in the UK, a large archival collection of Hughes' papers, comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries and correspondence has been acquired by The British Library. Such a large and varied collection will enable researchers to gain a greater understanding of the life and work of the poet. Before the collection can be made available to researchers it first needs to be catalogued and this process, which began at the beginning of December 2008, will be completed by the end of 2009. Once completed the catalogue should be able to act as a guide to the archive and will be accessible via The British Library’s website. A British Library blog relating to the cataloguing of the Hughes collection has been created and can be accessed at http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/ted_hughes_archive/. It is designed to provide updates about the cataloguing process, whilst also sharing information about any interesting or unexpected things found within the collection and any events coming up at The British Library relating to it.

References

Bibliography

• The Epic Poise: a celebration of Ted Hughes, edited by Nick Gammage, Faber and Faber, 1999.
• Ted Hughes: the life of a poet, by Elaine Feinstein, W.W. Norton, 2001.
• Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda pp 17–21, W.W. Norton, 2005.
• Ted Hughes: a literary life, by Neil Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

External links

• British Library - modern British Collections on Ted Hughes
• British Library - acquisition of archive press release
• British Library Hughes cataloguing blog
• Ted Hughes archive at Emory University
• Ted Hughes website with bibliography, biographical information, essays etc
• Ted Hughes homepage by Ann Skea
• Biography of Ted Hughes
• Ted Hughes - English Poet Laureate
• The Elmet Trust - Ted Hughes Festival, Mytholmroyd
• Mytholmroyd, the birthplace of Ted Hughes
• Nigel Lloyd's Mytholmroyd page (includes picture of Ted's first home)
• Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: the poetry of the will
• Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections