Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year he graduated from Cambridge. He used
two pseudonyms for the early publications, Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew. From 1955 to
1956, he worked as a rose gardener, night-watchman, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and
reader for J. Arthur Rank, and planned to teach in Spain then emigrate to Australia. February
26 saw the launch of the literary magazine, the St Botolph's Review, for which Hughes was
one of six co-producers. It was also the day he met Sylvia Plath; they were married in four
months.
Hughe's first book of poems, Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 to immediate acclaim,
winning the Harper publication contest. Over the next 41 years, he would write upwards of
90 books, and win numerous prizes and fellowships including the following (in that order):
Hughes is what some have called a nature poet. A keen countryman and hunter from a young
age, he viewed writing poems as a continuation of his earlier passion. ‘This is hunting and the
poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.’ (Poetry in
the Making , 1967)
A strong indirect source of interest in the person of Hughes (aside from his poetry) is his
seven-year marriage to the well-known American Poet, Sylvia Plath. Birthday Letters is a
sequence of lyrics written by Hughes in the first year of their marriage, cast as a continued
conversation with Plath.
When Plath committed suicide in 1963 (they had separated in 1962), many held Hughes
responsible for her death as a consequence of his adulterous relationship with Assia Wevill;
recent biographies such as Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet have attempted
to ‘set the record straight and clear the air of rancor and recrimination’ (Brooke Allen, The
New York Times ).
Though deeply marked by the loss, Hughes was publicly silent on the subject for more than
30 years out of his sense of responsibility to protect the couple's two young children, whose
perceptions of their mother would have otherwise been impossibly spoiled by external
interference. The publication of Birthday Letters has been seen as a 'retaking' of the histories
that had been stolen from the family through the cracks in the armour.
Quotes
‘Each image denotates another, so that the whole poem throbs’ – Edward Lucie Smith on
Hughes’ poetry, British Poetry since 1945
‘Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible
rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which you are
merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday- and things which
are a deep part of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated
from?’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making
‘It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the
doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just
something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over
and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years
ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the
way we are.’-Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making