TED HUGHESTHE LATE POET LAUREATE

by Ozkan ATASEVEN

Birth Date : August 17, 1930

Death Date : October 28, 1998

Place of Birth : Mytholmroyd, England

Place of Death: North Tawton, England

Nationality : English

Gender : Male

Occupations : Poet

BIOGRAPHY Ted Hughes is consistently described as one

of the twentieth century’s greatest English poets. His family moved to Mexborough when he was seven to run a newspaper and tobacco shop. He attended Mexborough grammar school, and wrote his first poems from the age of fifteen, some of which made their way into the school magazine.

Before beginning English studies at Cambridge University with a scholarship, he spent much of his National service time reading and rereading all of Shakespeare. At Cambridge, he spent most time reading folklore and Yeat's poems,' and switched from English to Archaeology and Anthropology in his third year.

His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year he graduated from Cambridge. He used two pseudonyms for the early publications, Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew. From 1955 to 1956, he worked as a rose gardener, night-watchman, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and reader for J. Arthur Rank, and planned to teach in Spain then emigrate to Australia. February 26 saw the launch of the literary magazine, the St Botolph's Review, for which Hughes was one of six co-producers. It was also the day he met Sylvia Plath; they were married in four months.

His poems:1957 — The Hawk in the Rain1960 — Lupercal1967 — Wodwo1967 — Recklings1970 — Crow1975 — Cave Birds1977 — Gaudete1979 — Moortown Diary1979 — Remains of Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin)1981 — Mooses1983 — River1986 — Flowers and Insects1989 — Wolfwatching1992 — Rain-charm for the Duchy1994 — New Selected Poems 1957-19941997 — Tales from Ovid1998 — Birthday Letters — winner of the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 1999 British Book of the Year award.2003 — Collected Poems

HIS STYLE

Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. Tennyson's phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" could have been written for Hughes. He is acutely aware of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world, and writes of it with fascination, fear and awe.

His later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, existential and satirical viewpoint

Hughes is what some have called a nature poet. A keen countryman and hunter from a young age, he viewed writing poems as a continuation of his earlier passion. ‘This is hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.’ (Poetry in the Making , 1967)

HIS PRIZES

Harper publication contest, Guiness Poetry Award, Guggenheim fellowship, Somerset Maughan award, city of Florence International Poetry Prize, Premio Internazionale Taormina Prize, Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, OBE, vote for the best writing in English in the New Poetry Poll, Whitbread Book of the Year, W.H. Smith Literature award, Forward Prize for Poetry, Queen’s Order of Merit, T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, South Bank Award for Literature, Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Book of the Year again.

In 1984, he was appointed England’s poet laureate.

WHAT IS A LAUREATE

The Poet Laureate, a member of the royal household, composes poems for state occasions. Since 1591, there have been 24 British laureates.

HUGHES AND PLATH

Strong indirect source of interest in the person of Hughes) is his seven-year marriage to the well-known American Poet, Sylvia Plath. Birthday Letters is a sequence of lyrics written by Hughes in the first year of their marriage, cast as a continued conversation with Plath.

When Plath committed suicide in 1963 (they had separated in 1962), many held Hughes responsible for her death as a consequence of his adulterous relationship with Assia Wevill

His first wife Sylvia Plath who committed suicide

Asia Wevill (who had a child from Hughes) also suicided in the same way as PlathHis last wife Carol

Orchard

QUOTES ‘Each image denotates another, so that the whole

poem throbs’ – Edward Lucie Smith on Hughes’ poetry

‘Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making

‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which you are merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday- and things which are a deep part of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated from?’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making

THE POEM “WIND”

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as The coal-house door. Once I looked up –

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

SUMMARY

  In his poem "Wind," Ted Hughes describes a menacing storm that strikes a house in a deserted, unpopulated area and the storm's destructive effect on the land. His use of personification, similes, metaphors, alliteration, and creative imagery creates an atmosphere of danger in the wake of nature's fury that inevitably evolves into an atmosphere of defeat and helplessness