Ted Hughes

Hughes's birthplace in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire

Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969),[6] and raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes's sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016) was two years older and his brother Gerald (1920–2016)[7] was ten years older.[8] One of his mother's ancestors had founded the Little Gidding community.[9]

Most of the more recent generations of his family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. Hughes's father, William, a joiner, was of Irish descent[10][11] and had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and fought at Ypres. He narrowly escaped being killed when a bullet lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket.[9] He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16).[12] The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out").[13] Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything".[14]

Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven before his family moved to Mexborough, then attending Schofield Street junior school.[9] His parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop.[8] 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.[13] During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby, which he said he would come to know "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse" were recollections of the area. A close friend at the time, John Wholly, took Hughes to the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough where the boys spent great swathes of time. Hughes became close to the family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholly's father, a gamekeeper. He came to view fishing as an almost religious experience.[9]

Hughes attended Mexborough Grammar School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry. Teachers Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Hughes was mentored by his sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry, and another teacher, John Fisher.[9][15] Poet Harold Massingham also attended this school and was also mentored by Fisher. In 1946, one of Hughes's 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.[8] By 16, he had no other thought than being a poet.[9]

During the same year, Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his national service first.[16] 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".[8] He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of W. B. Yeats's poetry.[9]

In 1951 Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M.J.C. Hodgart, an authority on balladic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodgart's supervision, but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary tradition.[9][17] He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself."[9] In his third year, he transferred to Anthropology and Archaeology, both of which would later inform his poetry.[18] He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954.[19][20] His first published poetry appeared in Chequer.[19] A poem, "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in Granta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.[21]

After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes went on to have many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper,[22] a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters.[19] On 25 February 1956,[23] 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.[24] She had already published extensively, having won various awards, and had come especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. There was a great mutual attraction but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath was passing through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later.

Hughes and Plath dated and then were married at St George the Martyr, Holborn, on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met. The date, Bloomsday, was purposely chosen in honour of James Joyce.[9] Plath's mother was the only wedding guest and she accompanied them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast.[26] Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not relate her history of depression and suicide attempts to him until much later.[9] 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.[26]

On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published in The Nation, Poetry and The Atlantic.[27] Plath typed up Hughes's 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.[26] The first prize was publication by Harper, garnering Hughes widespread critical acclaim with the book's release in September 1957, and resulting in him winning a Somerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard-hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of Middle English – a style he used throughout his career – over the more genteel latinate sounds.[9]

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's books, including Crow.[26] 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.[28] During this time, he wrote the poems that would be published in Wodwo (1967) and Recklings (1966). In March 1960, Lupercal came out and won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals.[9] He began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s.[29] He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche and poetry was the language of that work.[9]

Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca (b. 1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962–2009) 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 the cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962 and she set up life in a new flat with the children.[30][31]

Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her months before she miscarried their second child in 1961.[32]

Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963.[33] Hughes dramatically wrote in a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous."[34][35] Some people argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide.[36][37][38] Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall 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".[37] Plath's poem "The Jailer", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement.[39] Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath.[37][40] There were lawsuits, Morgan's 1972 book Monster which contained that poem was banned, and underground, pirated editions of it were published.[41] Other radical feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.[42] 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.[37][43]

As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book[33] and some critics of Hughes argued that he had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy.[33] 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.

Following Plath's suicide, he wrote two poems "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat" and then did not write poetry again for three years. He broadcast extensively, wrote critical essays and became involved in running Poetry International with Patrick Garland and Charles Osborne in the hopes of connecting English poetry with the rest of the world. In 1966, he wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrative The Life and Songs of the Crow, one of the works for which Hughes is best known.[9] In 1967, while living with Wevill, Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister; Gerald Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was offered for sale in 2012.[44]

On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas stove, Assia Wevill died by 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.[45][46][47] Hughes did not finish the Crow sequence until the work Cave Birds was published in 1975.[9]

The Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank – an 18th-century mill-owner's house, once Hughes's home

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 cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon called Moortown, a name which became embedded in the title of one of his poetry collections. He later became President of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh.[48] In October 1970, Crow was published.

In 1970, he and his sister, Olwyn (26 August 1928 – 3 January 2016),[49] set up the Rainbow Press, which published sixteen titles between 1971 and 1981, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney, printed by Daedalus Press, Rampant Lions Press and the John Roberts Press.

Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in December 1984, following Sir John Betjeman. A collection of animal poems for children had been published by Faber earlier that year, What is the Truth?, illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. For that work he won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award.[50] Hughes wrote many works for children and collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company.[51] He dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education and runs residential writing courses at Hughes's home at Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire.[51] In 1993, he made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which included him reading passages from his 1968 novel The Iron Man. He also featured in the 1994 documentary Seven Crows A Secret.[52]

In early 1994, Hughes became increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home. This concern inspired him to become one of the original trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity set up to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.[53]

Lumb Bank in the Calder Valley

Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. He continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal heart attack on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment for colon cancer in Southwark, London. His funeral was held on 3 November 1998, at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet Seamus 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."[54]

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, committed suicide in his home in Alaska on 16 March 2009 after suffering from depression.[55]

Carol Hughes announced in January 2013 that she would write a memoir of their marriage. The Times headlined its story "Hughes's widow breaks silence to defend his name" and observed that "for more than 40 years she has kept her silence, never once joining in the furious debate that has raged around the late Poet Laureate since the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath."[56]

A memoir by Hughes's brother Gerald was published late in 2014, Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir, which Kirkus Reviews calls "a warm recollection of a lauded poet".[57]

Hughes's 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.[68] 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".[68]

The West Riding dialect of Hughes's 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.[15]

Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian, and ecological viewpoint.[68] He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.[68]

In 1965, he founded with Daniel Weissbort the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which involved bringing to the attention of the West the work of Czesław Miłosz, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known, from such countries as Poland and Hungary, then controlled by the Soviet Union. Hughes wrote an introduction to a translation of Vasko Popa: Collected Poems, in the "Persea Series of Poetry in Translation", edited by Weissbort.[69] which was reviewed with favour by premiere literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University in The New York Review of Books.[69]

Hughes archival material is held by institutions such as Emory University and Exeter University. In 2008, the British Library acquired a large collection comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries, and correspondence.[82] The library archive is accessible through the British Library website.[83] There is also a Collection Guide available grouping together all of the Hughes material at the British Library with links to material held by other institutions.[84] Inspired by Hughes's Crow the German painter Johannes Heisig created a large painting series in black and white which was presented to the public for the first time on the occasion of Berlin Museum Long Night in August 2011 at the SEZ Berlin.[85]

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”.[86] Members of the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society recommend a living UK poet who has completed the newest and most innovative work that year, "highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life". The £5,000 prize was previously funded from the annual honorarium that former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy received as Laureate from The Queen.[87]

The Ted Hughes Society, founded in 2010, publishes a peer-reviewed on-line journal, which can be downloaded by members. Its website also publishes news, and has articles on all Hughes's major works for free access. The Society staged Hughes conferences in 2010 and 2012 at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and will continue to stage conferences elsewhere.

On 16 November 2013, Hughes's former hometown of Mexborough held a special performance trail, as part of its "Right Up Our Street" project, celebrating the writer's connection with the town. The free event included a two-hour ramble through Mexborough following the route of young Hughes's paper round. Participants visited some of the important locations which influenced the poet, with the trail beginning at Hughes's former home, which is now a furniture shop.[88]

The Elmet Trust, founded in 2006, celebrates the life and work of Ted Hughes. The Trust looks after Hughes's birthplace in Mytholmroyd, which is available as a holiday let and writer's retreat. The Trust also runs Hughes-related events, including an annual Ted Hughes Festival.[89]

• Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
• Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca
• 1968 Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems by Yehuda Amichai, Cape Goliard Press (London, England), revised edition published as Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.
• 1977 Amen by Yehuda Amichai, Amen, Harper (New York, NY)
• 1989 The Desert of Love: Selected Poems by János Pilinszky, Anvil Press Poetry (Greenwich, UK)[93]
• 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 Phèdre by Jean Racine, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)
• 1999 Alcestis by Euripides, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)

• Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Faber and Faber. 2004. ISBN 978-0-57-122343-5.[94]
• Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Faber and Faber. 2003. ISBN 978-0-57-113586-8.[95]
• A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse. Faber and Faber. 2000. ISBN 978-0-57-123379-3.[96]
• A Choice of Coleridge's Verse. Faber and Faber. 1996. ISBN 978-0-57-117604-5.[97]
• With Seamus Heaney, ed. (1982). The Rattle Bag. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-57-111976-9.[98]
• With Seamus Heaney, ed. (1997). The School Bag. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-57-117750-9.[99]
• By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Faber and Faber. 1997. ISBN 978-0-57-119263-2.[100]
• 1965: Modern Poetry in Translation (literary magazine)[101]
• Here Today (anthology for children). Hutchinson. 1963.[102]

• 1995 The Dreamfighter, and Other Creation Tales, Faber and Faber, London, England.
• 1995 Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories, Picador, New York, NY.

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

• 1961 Meet my Folks! (illustrated by George Adamson)
• 1963 How the Whale Became (illustrated by George Adamson)
• 1963 The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People (illustrated by R.A. Brandt)
• 1964 Nessie the Mannerless Monster (illustrated by Gerald Rose)
• 1967 Poetry in the Making[103]
• 1968 The Iron Man (first illustrated by George Adamson, in 1985 by Andrew Davidson and in 2019 by Chris Mould)[104][105][106]
• 1970 Coming of the Kings and Other Plays
• 1976 Season Songs (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
• 1976 Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
• 1978 Moon-Bells and Other Poems (illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers)
• 1981 Under the North Star (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)
• 1984 What Is the Truth? (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd), for which Hughes won the Guardian Prize[50]
• 1986 Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (illustrated by Chris Riddell)
• 1987 The Cat and the Cuckoo (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd)
• 1988 Tales of the Early World (illustrated by Andrew Davidson)
• 1993 The Iron Woman (illustrated by Andrew Davidson)
• 1993 The Mermaid's Purse (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd, Sunstone Press)
• 1995 Collected Animal Poems: Vols. 1–4, Faber & Faber

• 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), 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 (based on juvenile work).
• The Price of a Bride (juvenile, radio play), broadcast, 1966.
• Adapted Seneca's Oedipus, produced in London, 1968).
• Orghast (with Peter Brook), produced in Persepolis, Iran, 1971.
• Eat Crow, Rainbow Press, London, England, 1971.
• The Iron Man, juvenile, televised, 1972.
• Orpheus, 1973.

• 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's poems have been published as limited-edition broadsides.[107]