Edward James Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Hughes married fellow poet, American Sylvia Plath, in 1956. They lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962. Plath ended her life in 1963.
Biography
Early life
left|thumb|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). He was raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. The third child, Hughes had a brother Gerald (1920–2016), who was ten years older. Next came their sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016), who was two years older than Ted.
One of their mother's ancestors, Nicholas Ferrar, had founded the Little Gidding community. Most of the more recent generations of the family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area.
Hughes's father, William, a joiner, was of Irish descent. He had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and fought at Ypres. He narrowly escaped being killed; he was saved when a bullet hit him but lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket.
The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out").
Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven. After his family moved to Mexborough, he attended Schofield Street Junior School.
During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby. He later said that he came to know it "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse", were recollections of the area. At the age of about 13 a friend, John Wholey, took Hughes to his home at Crookhill Lodge, on the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough. There the boys could fish and shoot. Hughes became close to the Wholey family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholey's father, the head gardener and gamekeeper on the estate. Hughes came to view fishing as an almost religious experience. His two years of national service (1949–1951) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire. During this time, he had little to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". 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." He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954.
His first published poetry appeared in Chequer.
After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes had 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, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. 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 American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, won multiple awards, and came to the party specifically to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. Hughes and Plath felt a great mutual attraction, but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath passed through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later.
Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn, four months after they had first met. They chose the date, Bloomsday, in honour of Irish writer James Joyce.
Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not tell him about her history of depression and suicide attempts until much later. Plath typed up Hughes's manuscript for his collection Hawk in the Rain, which won a competition run by the Poetry centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. During this time, he wrote the poems that would later be published in Recklings (1966) and Wodwo (1967).
In March 1960, his book Lupercal was published, and it won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche, and poetry was the language of that work.
In 1966, after Plath's death, 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. Hughes did not finish the Crow sequence until after his work Cave Birds was published in 1975.
Sylvia Plath's death
Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963. Plath, who had a history of suicide attempts, tucked her two children into bed before putting her head in the oven and taking her own life through the inhalation of gas. She died during one of the coldest winters Britain had experienced in decades, with severe frost and frozen pipes, making life difficult for her and her young children in London. When Plath died, Hughes was in bed with his lover at the time, Susan Alliston.
As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the posthumous publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). Hughes was criticized for editing choices he made after Plath's death, like omitting the poem "The Jailer" and "The Rabbit Catcher" from Ariel. Some of the poems omitted include themes of domestic abuse and rape. In a 2004 edition of Ariel, twelve poems were added in, and Hughes wrote they were initially omitted because they were “personally aggressive.”
Hughes admitted to destroying the final volume of Plath's journal which detailed their last few months together. In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), he defended his actions as a consideration toward his young children. Feminists and fans of Sylvia Plath's work were upset and argued that he had essentially driven Plath to suicide and should not be responsible for her literary legacy. Plath's mother said she witnessed Hughes attempt to strangle Plath on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain. Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her, including an incident two days before she miscarried their second child in 1961. That letter also said Hughes told Plath he wishes she were dead.
Feminist Robin Morgan published a poem "Arraignment", in her book Monster (1972), where she said Hughes murdered Plath. She references Plath's poem "The Jailer", where Plath writes, "I have been drugged and raped."
Following Plath's death and Morgan's poem, feminists repeatedly heckled Hughes in public and even threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.
</blockquote>Following Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote two poems expressing his grief, "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat". He 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.
On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide, Assia Wevill took her own life by the same method: asphyxiation from a gas stove. Wevill also killed her daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), whose father was Hughes. These deaths resulted in reports that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.
1970–1998
thumb|right|The Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, [[Lumb Bank – an 18th-century mill-owner's house, once Hughes's home]]
In August 1970, Hughes married a second time, to Carol Orchard, a nurse. They were together until his death. Heather Clark in her biography of Plath, Red Comet (2021), observed that Hughes "would never be faithful to a woman after he left Plath". <!-- This biography was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Needs citation to be included in content. -->
Hughes bought a house known as Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, while still maintaining the property at Court Green. He also began cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon, called Moortown; he used this name as the title of one of his poetry collections. Later he served as the president of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh. set up the Rainbow Press. Between 1971 and 1981, it published sixteen titles, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. The works were printed by Daedalus Press in Norfolk, Rampant Lions Press, and the John Roberts Press.
Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in December 1984, following Sir John Betjeman. A collection of his 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.
In 1993, Hughes made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, reading passages from his 1968 novel The Iron Man. He was featured in the 1994 documentary Seven Crows A Secret.
In early 1994, increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home, Hughes became involved in conservation activism. He was one of the founding trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity established to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.
thumb|right|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 had 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.
On 3 November 1998, his funeral was held at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet Seamus Heaney, said:
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>
On 16 March 2009, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide in his home in Alaska. He had suffered from depression.
In January 2013, Carol Hughes announced 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."
Hughes's brother Gerald published a memoir late in 2014, Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir. Kirkus Reviews described it as "a warm recollection of a lauded poet".
Work
thumb|right| Homage to Ted Hughes by [[Reginald Gray (artist)|Reginald Gray (2004), Bankfield Museum, Halifax]]
Hughes's first collection, The 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 praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse. Crow was edited several times across Hughes' career. Within its opus he created a cosmology of the totemic Crow who was simultaneously God, Nature and Hughes' alter ego. The publication of Crow shaped Hughes' poetic career as distinct from other forms of English Nature Poetry.
In a 1971 interview with The London Magazine, Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins, and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves's book The White Goddess, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Hughes worked for 10 years on a prose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film. It tells the story of the vicar of an English village who is carried off by elemental spirits, and replaced in the village by his enantiodromic double, a changeling, fashioned from a log, who nevertheless has the same memories as the original vicar. The double is a force of nature who organises the women of the village into a "love coven" in order that he may father a new messiah. When the male members of the community discover what is going on, they murder him. The epilogue consists of a series of lyrics spoken by the restored priest in praise of a nature goddess, inspired by Robert Graves's White Goddess. 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.
In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. His Tales from Ovid (1997) contains a selection of free verse translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses. He also wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books being The Iron Man, written to comfort his children after their mother Sylvia Plath's suicide. It later became the basis of Pete Townshend's 1989 rock musical of the same name, and of the 1999 animated film The Iron Giant, the latter of which is dedicated to his memory.
Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 following the death of John Betjeman. It was later known that Hughes was second choice for the appointment. Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, had declined, because of ill health and a loss of creative momentum, dying a year later. Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998. In 1992 Hughes published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a monumental work inspired by Graves's The White Goddess. The book, considered Hughes's key work of prose, had a mixed reception "divided between those who considered it an important and original appreciation of Shakespeare's complete works, whilst others dismissed it as a lengthy and idiosyncratic appreciation of Shakespeare refracted by Hughes's personal belief system". Hughes himself later suggested that the time spent writing prose was directly responsible for a decline in his health. Also in 1992, Hughes published Rain Charm for the Duchy, collecting together for the first time his Laureate works, including poems celebrating important royal occasions. The book also contained a section of notes throwing light on the context and genesis of each poem.
In 1998, his Tales from Ovid won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. In Birthday Letters, his last collection, Hughes broke his silence on Plath, detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time. The book, the cover artwork for which was by their daughter Frieda, won the 1999 Whitbread Prize for poetry.
Hughes's definitive 1,333-page Collected Poems (Faber & Faber) appeared (posthumously) in 2003. A poem discovered in October 2010, "Last letter", describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide. It was published in New Statesman on National Poetry Day, October 2010. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy told Channel 4 News that the poem was "the darkest poem he has ever written" and said that for her it was "almost unbearable to read".
In 2011, several previously unpublished letters from Hughes to Craig Raine were published in the literary review Areté. They relate mainly to the process of editing Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and also contain a sequence of drafts of letters in which Raine attempts to explain to Hughes his disinclination to publish Hughes's poem The Cast in an anthology he was editing, on the grounds that it might open Hughes to further attack on the subject of Sylvia Plath. "Dear Ted, Thanks for the poem. It is very interesting and would cause a minor sensation" (4 April 1997). The poem was eventually published in Birthday Letters and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997).