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Ted Hughes. A Brief Introduction

Edward J. Hughes grew up in Yorkshire where the bleak moorland and its wildlife provided a backdrop to many of his poems. He attended Mexborough Grammar School in a coal-mining town and won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied English and anthropology. Before going to university he served for two years in the Royal Air Force.

At Cambridge he was known as a wild working-class student. He met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath who was to commit suicide in 1963. Their relationship was tempestuous and they moved to London where Hughes held a series of part-time jobs and worked on his first volume of poetry The Hawk in the Rain (1957). This was followed by Pike (1959) and Lupercal (1960) which received both the Somerset-Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. The success of these books allowed Hughes to buy a cottage in Devon, but Plath’s depression deepened to the point where she took her own life. Hughes never got over her death. His German lover Assia Wevill also killed herself and her daughter in 1969.
Hughes was one of the original members of the Arvon Foundation which encouraged new writers. He was by now an established literary figure though with a reputation for poetry red in tooth and claw together with feral imagery – as witnessed in Crow (1970).

Awards and honours came to him: the OBE in 1977 and the Laureateship in 1984 on the death of John Betjeman, finally the OM.

His anthropological studies had given him an interest in mythology and magic. He believed that poetry is an exploration of the inner self and has a semi-religious function as a release of suppressed creative energies.

His last work Birthday Letters (1998) is a study of Sylvia Plath’s life with mystical overtones. By the date of its publication Hughes knew that he was dying of cancer. A memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey.

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