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Ted Hughes

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Ted Hughes
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(born Aug. 16, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, Eng. — died Oct. 28, 1998, Devon) British poet. The son of shopkeepers, he studied at Cambridge University. He married the American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956. His first volumes of verse were The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960). After Plath's 1963 suicide he wrote little for three years, then began publishing prolifically, often in collaboration with illustrators or photographers. His collections include Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Cave Birds (1975), Gaudete (1977), and Wolf Watching (1989). His most characteristic work emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. He wrote many volumes for children (including The Iron Man, 1968) and edited the journal Modern Poetry in Translation. In 1984 he became Britain's poet laureate. Birthday Letters (1998), published shortly before his death, consists of revealing poems about his relationship with Plath.

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Biography: Ted Hughes
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Ted Hughes (born 1930) was an eminent English poet who led a resurgence of English poetic innovation starting in the late 1950s. He was named poet laureate in 1985.

Ted Hughes was born in 1930 in the Yorkshire town of Mytholmroyd in England. His home backed onto a canal, while close by was the main road from the Yorkshire woolen towns to the cotton centers of Lancashire over the Pennine hills. This landscape was indelibly to shape his future poetry as he struggled to create a usable language that could accommodate poetry and literature to the demands of an increasingly post-literate society.

In the 1950s Hughes went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he started to "read" English but changed to anthropology as he felt that the academic study of English literature conflicted with his search for poetic creativity. It was at Cambridge in 1956 that he met the American poet Sylvia Plath whom he later married. The marriage produced a son and a daughter before Plath's suicide in 1963. During the time they were together an important process of mutual aesthetic stimulation took place, and it is a relationship that has fascinated some critics almost as much as that between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

In 1957 Hughes' first book of poetry, Hawk in the Rain, was published to immediate acclaim and placed him as a leading exponent of what the critic A. Alvarez called the "new depth poetry." Hughes' poetry revolted against the depiction of landscape in romantic and genteel terms - this had been a dominant tradition in English poetry from the time of the Lake poets of the early 19th century and had received a new impetus from the Georgians before World War I. However, Hughes was also reacting to the modernism of such poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot and the concern for ritual and ceremony and was instead preoccupied with developing a more vital and direct link with animals and nature. In many ways this was a brutal and violent depiction of struggle and a Darwinian interest in the survival of the fittest. Hughes later stated that as a boy he had been fascinated by animals, seeing them as representatives of another world which was "the true world." The only relationship, though, as a boy from the town was one of catching or killing animals, and this reinforced the idea that animals were by nature victims of man's aggressive impulses.

Hughes' attitude to animals was a direct and self-conscious one, and he did not see them as strange and alien creatures and as representatives of mysterious hidden forces like D. H. Lawrence. The poem "The Horses," for instance, in The Hawk in the Rain speaks of horses as "Grey silent fragments of a grey silent world" and ends with the poet's later memory of meeting the horses in "hour-before-dawn dark": "In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces, /May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place."

Hughes became especially known for his graphic depiction of struggle and conflict such as the poem "Pike" in his second volume Lupercal in 1960: "Three we kept behind glass, /Jungled in weed: three inches, four, /And four and a half: fed fry to them-/Suddenly there were two. Finally one." The poem was also important for linking this natural struggle to the search for another England with which a number of poets of Hughes' generation were concerned. The pond in which Hughes used to fish in "Pike" had: "Stilled, legendary depth: /It was as deep as England. It held/Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old/That past nightfall I dared not cast." The discovery of this England was clearly an immense task as the weight and burden of tradition was lifted away from English culture. For Hughes, though, this was an opportunity for the affirmation of a relationship with the surrounding landscape which, in his early period at least, was not burdened by Christian myth and ritual. His employment of pagan imagery thus, to some extent, distinguished him from the more religious concerns of Plath.

In the case of the poem "Hawk Roosting" in Lupercal, however, he was accused by some critics of writing a paean to fascist power as he depicted an animal in anthropomorphic terms: "I kill where I please because it is all mine. /There is no sophistry in my body: /My manners are tearing off heads." Similarly in the later collection Crow (1970) where he had chosen a considerably less aggressive natural symbol, "A Childish Prank" was seen as demeaning the relation between men and women as "Crow laughed. / He bit the Worm, God's only son, /Into two writhing halves." On the other hand, in Hughes' later poetry the beginnings of a healing process can be seen to have occurred as Hughes celebrated a more varied view of nature beyond that of struggle and survival. In Moortown (1978) the "Birth of Rainbow" offers a more optimistic view of procreation as the birth of a calf is described, while Hughes moved towards a fuller acceptance of the Christian tradition:" … then the world blurred/And disappearing in forty-five degree hail/And a gate-jerking blast. We got to cover. / Left to God the calf and his mother."

Hughes' poetry established his pre-eminence in English poetry at an early stage and indicated a resurgence of English poetic innovation after a long period of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish dominance. Hawk in the Rain won the First Publications Award in New York in 1957 and Lupercal won the Hawthornden Prize in 1961. Hughes won the Guinness Poetry Award in 1958 and the Somerset Maughan Award in 1960 and was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 1959-1960. He also became a children's poet, publishing Meet My Folks in 1961, The Earth-Owl and Other Moon People in 1963, and Nessie, The Mannerless Monsterin 1964, together with collections of children's stories. Hughes saw children's verse as a vital accompaniment to his poetry for he saw children as an important potential audience for poets, especially through the use of tapes and videos in schools.

Hughes' varied contributions to poetry led to his finally succeeding the late Sir John Betjeman as poet laureate in 1985. The appointment marked a radical departure from the genteel view of poetry of his popular predecessor. While clearly a major English poet, Hughes cannot be described as simply celebrating Englishness from a standpoint of inward-looking nationalism. Many of his early poems especially share a more general post-modernist concern with struggle and the violent affirmation of identity, and some more traditionally-minded critics have seen them as rather alien to the English spirit of harmony and compromise.

Since becoming poet laureate in 1985, Hughes' publications include verse: Flowers and Insects (1989), Moortown Diary (1989), Rain-charm for the Duchy (1992), New Selected Poems 1957-1994 (1995); libretti: Wedekind, Spring Awakening (1995); stories: Tales of the Early World (1988), The Iron Woman (1993), The Dreamfighter (1995), Collected Animal Poems (1995); and prose: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992), Winter Pollen (1994), and Difficulties of a Bridegroom (1995). In 1996, Hughes translated and published two dozen passages from Latin poet Publius Ouidius Naso's Metamorphoses.

Further Reading

Additional information on Ted Hughes can be found in Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes (Cambridge, 1975); Margaret D. Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1979); Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (London, 1981); Keith Sagar (editor), The Achievement of Ted Hughes (Manchester University Press, 1983); David Porter, "Ted Hughes" in The American Poetry Review (1971); Anthony Libby, "God's Lioness and the Priest of Sycorax: Plath and Hughes" in Contemporary Literature (1974); and Michael Wood, "We All Hate Home: English Poetry since World War II" in Contemporary Literature (1977).

Fairy Tale Companion: Ted Hughes
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Hughes, Ted (Edward James Hughes, 1930–98), English poet and poet laureate from 1984. Renowned for its evocation of the natural world, Hughes's poetry is deeply influenced by mythology, and volumes such as Crow (1970) seem to distil the stark unsentimentality of folk tale and fable. His explicit dealings with the fairy tale include the children's play, Beauty and the Beast (broadcast 1965; first produced 1971), and the short story ‘The Head’ (1978). His writing for children also includes Tales of the Early World (1988) and a number of animal fables.

— Stephen Benson

Wikipedia: Ted Hughes
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For the Canadian judge, see Ted Hughes (judge).
Ted Hughes
Born 17 August 1930(1930-08-17)
Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, England
Died 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.[1] 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.[2][3]

Contents

Early life

Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 at number 1, Aspinal Street, in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire to William Henry and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes[4]and raised among the local farms in the area. According to Hughes, "My first 6 years shaped everything."[5] When Hughes was seven his family moved to Mexborough, South Yorkshire, where they ran a newsagents and tobacco shop. His brother Gerald was 10 years older and his sister Olwyn, two years older. He attended Mexborough Grammar School, where his teachers encouraged him to write. In 1946 one of his 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 of which he mentions that he had nothing to do but read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow.

Personal life and death

Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge.[6] 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.[7] ”

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.[8] 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.[9]

Search Wikinews Wikinews has related news: Son of poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide

Hughes' son with Plath, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide on March 16, 2009 after battling depression.[10]

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, existential and satirical 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 a survival struggle between twins, and it illustrates the pattern of love and strife in his most intimate relationships. 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.[11]

Tales from Ovid (1997) contains a selection of free verse translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Birthday Letters, 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 poetry, Hughes wrote classical opera librettos and children's books. One of these, The Iron Man, was 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

Translations

Anthologies edited by Hughes

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)[12]

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.[13]

References

  1. ^ Daily Telegraph, "Philip Hensher reviews Collected Works of Ted Hughes, plus other reviews", April 2004
  2. ^ Middlebrook, D. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage. London, Penguin: 2003.
  3. ^ Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer: Guardian journalist Nadeem Azam, writing in 1Lit.com, 2006
  4. ^ "Ted Hughes Homepage". ann.skea.com. http://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-30. 
  5. ^ "Ted Hughes: Timeline". http://ann.skea.com/timeline.htm. Retrieved 2006-08-22. 
  6. ^ "Ted Hughes". www.kirjasto.sci.fi. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/thughes.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-30. 
  7. ^ Centre for Ted Hughes Studies - Ted Hughes timeline
  8. ^ BBC Devon - Ted Hughes Trail
  9. ^ BBC Devon - Ted Hughes memorial
  10. ^ Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide Yahoo News, March 23, 2009
  11. ^ Richard Price, Ted Hughes and the Book Arts
  12. ^ Willkommen beim Berliner Chormusik-Verlag
  13. ^ Helen Broderick, Ted Hughes cataloguer, Modern Poetry Manuscripts, The British Library, January 2009

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

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Academic offices
Preceded by
John Betjeman		 British Poet Laureate
1984–1998		 Succeeded by
Andrew Motion
v • d • e
Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Laureates

Robert Rozhdestvensky (1966) · Bulat Okudzhava (1967) · László Nagy (1968) · Mak Dizdar (1969) · Miodrag Pavlović (1970) · Wystan Hugh Auden (1971) · Pablo Neruda (1972) · Eugenio Montale (1973) · Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (1974) · Léopold Sédar Senghor (1975) · Eugène Guillevic (1976) · Artur Lundkvist (1977) · Rafael Alberti (1978) · Miroslav Krleža (1979) · Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1980) · Blaže Koneski (1981) · Nichita Stănescu (1982) · Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan 'Ajneya' (1983) · Andrey Voznesensky (1984) · Yiannis Ritsos (1985) · Allen Ginsberg (1986) · Tadeusz Różewicz (1987) · Desanka Maksimović (1988) · Thomas W. Shapcott (1989) · Justo Jorge Padrón (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Ferenc Juhász (1992) · Gennadiy Aygi (1993) · Ted Hughes (1994) · Yehuda Amichai (1995) · Makoto Ooka (1996) · Adunis (1997) · Lu Yuan (1998) · Yves Bonnefoy (1999) · Edoardo Sanguineti (2000) · Seamus Heaney (2001) · Slavko Mihalić (2002) · Tomas Tranströmer (2003) · Vasco Graça Moura (2004) · William S. Merwin (2005) · Nancy Morejón (2006) · Mahmoud Darwish (2007) · Fatos Arapi (2008) · Tomaž Šalamun (2009)

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