BIOGRAPHY

Ted Hughes is consistently described as one of
the twentieth century’s greatest English poets.
His family moved to Mexborough when he was
seven to run a newspaper and tobacco shop. He
attended Mexborough grammar school, and wrote
his first poems from the age of fifteen, some of
which made their way into the school magazine.

Before beginning English studies at Cambridge
University with a scholarship, he spent much of
his National service time reading and rereading
all of Shakespeare. At Cambridge, he spent most
time reading folklore and Yeat's poems,' and
switched from English to Archaeology and
Anthropology in his third year.

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 coproducers. It was also the day he met Sylvia
Plath; they were married in four months.
His poems:
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
HIS STYLE
Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature
and, in particular, the innocent savagery of
animals, an interest from an early age.
Tennyson's phrase "nature, red in tooth and
claw" could have been written for Hughes. He is
acutely aware of the mixture of beauty and
violence in the natural world, and writes of it
with fascination, fear and awe.
 His later work is deeply reliant upon myth and
the bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a
modernist, existential and satirical viewpoint


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)

Harper publication contest, Guiness Poetry Award,
Guggenheim fellowship, Somerset Maughan award,
city of Florence International Poetry Prize, Premio
Internazionale Taormina Prize, Queen’s Gold Medal
for Poetry, OBE, vote for the best writing in English
in the New Poetry Poll, Whitbread Book of the Year,
W.H. Smith Literature award, Forward Prize for
Poetry, Queen’s Order of Merit, T.S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry, South Bank Award for Literature, Whitbread
Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Book of the Year
again.
In 1984, he was appointed England’s poet laureate.
WHAT IS A LAUREATE

The Poet Laureate, a member of the royal
household, composes poems for state occasions.
Since 1591, there have been 24 British laureates.
HUGHES AND PLATH

Strong indirect source of interest in the person of
Hughes) is his seven-year marriage to the wellknown 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
His first wife Sylvia Plath
who committed suicide
His last wife Carol Orchard
Asia Wevill (who had a child from
Hughes) also suicided in the same
way as Plath
QUOTES

‘Each image denotates another, so that the whole
poem throbs’ – Edward Lucie Smith on Hughes’
poetry
‘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
THE POEM “WIND”
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a blackBack gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
SUMMARY

In his poem "Wind," Ted Hughes describes a
menacing storm that strikes a house in a
deserted, unpopulated area and the storm's
destructive effect on the land. His use of
personification, similes, metaphors, alliteration,
and creative imagery creates an atmosphere of
danger in the wake of nature's fury that
inevitably evolves into an atmosphere of defeat
and helplessness