Poetry:
The Hawk in the Rain, 1957
Lupercal, 1960
Wodwo, 1967
Crow, 1970, revised 1972
Selected Poems, 1957-1967, 1972
Cave Birds, 1975 (revised as Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama, 1978)
Gaudete, 1977
Remains of Elmet, 1979
Moortown, 1979
Selected Poems 1957-1981, 1982
River, 1983
Flowers and Insects: Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders, 1986
The Cat and the Cuckoo, 1987
Wolfwatching, 1989
Rain-Charm for the Duchy, and Other Laureate Poems, 1992
Three Books, 1993 (includes Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, and River)
Elmet, 1994
Collected Animal Poems, 1995
New Selected Poems, 1957-1994, 1995
Birthday Letters, 1998
Short Fiction:
The Threshold, 1979
Difficulties of a Bridegroom, 1995
Drama:
The Calm, pr. 1961
Epithalamium, pr. 1963
Seneca’s Oedipus, pr. 1968
Orghast, pr. 1971
Eat Crow, pb. 1971
The Story of Vasco, pr. 1974 (music by Gordon Crosse; adaptation of a play by Georges Schehadé)
Radio Plays:
The House of Aries, 1960
A Houseful of Women, 1961
The Wound, 1962
Difficulties of a Bridegroom, 1963
Dogs, 1964
The House of Donkeys, 1965
The Head of Gold, 1967
Nonfiction:
Poetry Is, 1970
Shakespeare’s Poem, 1971
Henry Williamson: A Tribute, 1979
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1992, revised 1993
Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, 1994 (W. Scammel, editor)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Meet My Folks!, 1961
The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, 1963
How the Whale Became, 1963 (stories)
Nessie the Mannerless Monster, 1964 (also known as Nessie the Monster, 1974)
Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from “Listening and Writing,” 1967 (revised as Poetry Is, 1970)
The Iron Giant: A Story in Five Nights, 1968 (pb. in England as The Iron Man, 1968)
Five Autumn Songs for Children’s Voices, 1969
The Coming of the King and Other Plays, 1970 (augmented as The Tiger’s Bones and Other Plays for Children, 1974)
Orpheus, 1971 (play)
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, 1974 (revised as Season Songs, 1975)
Earth-Moon, 1976
Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, 1976
Moon-Bells and Other Poems, 1978
The Pig Organ: Or, Pork with Perfect Pitch, 1980 (play; music by Richard Blackford)
Under the North Star, 1981
What Is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young, 1984
Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, 1986
Tales of the Early World, 1988
The Iron Woman: A Sequel to “The Iron Man,” 1993
The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales, 1995
The Iron Wolf, 1995
Shaggy and Spotty, 1997
Translations:
Selected Poems, 1968 (of Yehuda Amichai; with Amichai)
Selected Poems, 1976 (of Janós Pilinszky; with Janós Csokits)
Amen, 1977 (of Amichai; with Amichai)
Time, 1979 (of Amichai; with Amichai)
Blood Wedding, 1996 (of Federico García Lorca)
Phèdre, 1998 (of Jean Racine)
Alcestis, 1999 (of Euripides)
The Oresteia, 1999 (of Aeschylus)
Edited Texts:
New Poems 1962, 1962 (with Patricia Beer and Vernon Scannell)
Here Today, 1963
Five American Poets, 1963 (with Thom Gunn)
Selected Poems, 1964 (by Keith Douglas)
Ariel, 1965 (by Sylvia Plath)
A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, 1968
With Fairest Flowers While Summer Last: Poems from Shakespeare, 1971 (also known as A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, 1971)
Crossing the Water, 1971 (by Plath)
Winter Trees, 1971 (by Plath)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Other Prose Writings, 1977, augmented 1979 (by Plath)
New Poetry Six, 1980
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 1981
The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982 (with Frances McCullough)
1980 Anthology: Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition, 1982 (with Seamus Heaney)
The Rattle Bag: An Anthology, 1982 (with Heaney)
Selected Poems, 1985 (by Plath)
A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse, 1996
The School Bag, 1997 (with Heaney)
By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember, 1997
The youngest of the three children of Edith Farrar Hughes and William Henry Hughes, Ted Hughes grew up on the sprawling and barren moors of West Yorkshire, where he spent his boyhood scouting the wilderness with his older brother, an avid hunter and woodsman. These early experiences with nature began a lifelong preoccupation with animals which would form the basis for one of the most unique and powerful voices in English poetry.
Ted Hughes
While Hughes was still a boy his family moved to Mexborough, where Hughes began writing poetry, encouraged by an English teacher at the town’s only grammar school. Following his national service, Hughes enrolled at Cambridge University and studied archaeology and anthropology. With a group of classmates he founded a literary magazine, St. Botolph’s Review, and at its inaugural party in 1956 he met a young American college student, poet Sylvia Plath. They were married only four months later.
Hughes and Plath influenced each other’s writing and sensibilities, with her learning about “woods and animals and earth” (in her words) from Hughes, and him learning about American poetry from her. The manuscript for Hughes’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was submitted to a New York poetry contest by Plath, who typed the manuscript for Hughes. First prize, which Hughes won, was publication of the book. Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda, born in 1960, and Nicholas, born in 1962. By mid-1962, however, their marriage was disintegrating–Hughes had become involved with another woman–and they returned to London separately from Devon, where they had been living. Plath sank into a deep depression and committed suicide in February, 1963.
For a few years after Plath’s death, Hughes primarily wrote books for children; his next book of poetry for adults was Wodwo, published in 1967. In 1969, tragedy struck again when Assia Gutzmann, his new partner, and her child died. In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard. Hughes spent time living in Yorkshire, London, and, primarily, Devon. He was named poet laureate of England in 1984, succeeding Sir John Betjeman.
Hughes’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain, contains a number of poems written from the perspectives of animals, and it depicts the animal world as alien to that of humans. This volume contains “The Thought-Fox,” one of Hughes’s most famous poems. This theme was carried further in Lupercal. As a writer of so-called animal poetry, Hughes was at first linked with the Romantic tradition because of his treatment of life in the natural world and of humanity’s paradoxical kinship and exile from that world. However, Hughes did not sentimentalize nature or render it impressionistically, as the Romantics had often done; instead, he presented nature in all its fury and raw power, revealing what William Butler Yeats had called its “murderous innocence.” Nature for Hughes is neither good nor evil; it simply exists. What good humanity can take from it consists of the ability, on the one hand, to resist the urge to anthropomorphize and defang it, while on the other hand refraining from an overly scientific view, which, with its penchant for reductionist explanation, demystifies the primal energy at the heart of the human experience.
Hughes’s masterpiece, Crow, illustrates the theme underlying most of the poet’s work: that humanity lies caught in its own trap, cut off from the instinctual world of animals on one side, and cut off from God–by science and rationalism–on the other. What remains, then, is the life force itself–that is, the desire to succeed and survive in the face of ultimate defeat and inevitable death. Hughes thus became the poet of primal energy, the bard of the unvanquished “I am.”
In Gaudete Hughes continued to create a new mythic treatment of life. In this long narrative poem the poet relates the story of a priest who is spirited away and replaced by a substitute with a prodigious sexual appetite. Both tragic and comic, the poem reveals many of the dichotomies lying at the heart of human existence–male and female, Christian and pagan, human and animal–emphasizing both their closeness and their differences.
Remains of Elmet explores the country of the poet’s origin as he traces the history of England from an ancient kingdom inhabited by druids and other nature worshippers to a modern industrial nation populated by secular humanists. Still, despite the progress of science and industry, Hughes effectively portrays the haunting and magical power of his boyhood landscape.
Despite his own reputation as a poet, Hughes was in many ways overshadowed by the ghost of Plath, who became an icon of the oppressed female artist for the feminist movement. As a result, Hughes was cast in the role of the patriarchal oppressor who drove her to suicide. Futhermore, as Plath’s literary executor, Hughes was extremely protective of her works, often refusing permissions to quote from them and steadfastly refusing to talk about their marriage. His publication shortly before his death of Birthday Poems, a collection of prose poems that reflect in depth on his life with Plath, was therefore something of a surprise to the literary world. The book won the Whitbread Prizes for both Poetry and Book of the Year, as well as the Forward Prize, and in 1998 he was also made a member of the Order of Merit.