Ted Hughes, 1930
British poet Ted Hughes with full name Edward James Hughes served as poet laureate from 1984 to 1998; people note his work for its symbolism, passion, and dark natural imagery.
He, the brother of Gerald Hughes and husband of Sylvia Plath, fathered Frieda Hughes and .
Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.
The dialect of native west riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of verse of Hughes. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern a number of his poems reflected. In 1956, he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year of publication of
The Hawk in the Rain
, his first volume of verse. Other works quickly followed.
The couple earlier separated, and following suicide of Plath in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for almost three years but thereafter published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in
Under the North Star
(1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including
Remains of Elmet
(1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965, he co-edited the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London.
Winter Pollen
(1994) published some of essays of Hughes on subjects of literary and cultural criticism. After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of
Birthday Letters
(1998).
“And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.”
“Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.”