About
Born in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes was the son of one out of only seventeen men that managed to make it home alive after their service in Gallipoli during World War I. Although Hughes never served in the military, his father imparted such vivid recollections of the terrors of war upon his son that it would forever leave an imprint upon his work.
Characteristics of Hughes' Poetry:
- "The terrible negativity that dominates all of Hughes' poetry is the consequence of what the poet sees as a monstrous universe duplicated over and over by the nightmarish events of our time" (Zinnes)
- "The energy and vitality of Hughes' language and rhythms not only arise out of remembered violence and death, , out of primordial and existential fears, but are in themselves expressions of defiance, of an indominable lust for life" (Zinnes)
- "Hughes does not fight against the world. He sees it as it happens before his eyes" (Zinnes)
- "Hughes poetry contrasts the natural world of gentler animals with the murder of men in battle" (Meyers)
“I hang on tooth and nail to my own view of what I do — which is a view from the inside. It is fatally easy to acquire, through other people, a view of one’s own work from the outside. As when a child is admired, in its hearing, for something it does naturally. Ever after — that something is corrupted with self-consciousness.”
- Ted Hughes on his own work
Other important aspects of Hughes' Prose and Style:
- Wrote about "unlovely truths that have been prevented from being shown in poetry except in an "ethical poetry condemning them" (Vendler)
- violent phrases, thick sounds, explosive verbs
- Relation of man to animal ("Animal world as a human mirror")
- surreal symbolism
Other Achievements:
Hughes' Significance
Like many other poets of his time, Hughes made the decision to depict the horrors of war in all of their bloody, violent, actuality. However, he never actually participated in the wars he spoke of. One of the most unique aspects of his poetry is its ability to make man and animal indistinguishable from one another. Rather that attempt to beautify the ugliest parts of human nature, Hughes instead depicted them as they were. Hughes helped to revolutionize the idea that poetry does not always have to be "pretty" to be meaningful. The relationships that Hughes holds with nature differs greatly with the amicable, awestruck tone of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, and instead turns an eye to the darker parts of the natural world in relation to human beings. Here are what some other writers/ poets had to say about ted Hughes and his body of work:
"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."
- Seamus Heaney
"Hughes's commonest vantage point is the eye, the retina, or "the mind's eye"
- James Wood in his article on England in The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing (1996) (Zinnes)
Hughes was, for better or worse, devoted to elaborate symbolic structures. Yeats had “A Vision”; Robert Graves had “The White Goddess”; Hughes had his personal hodgepodge of mysticism, astrology and Jungian psychology.
- David Orr, in his article "Love, Your Ted". New York Times, November 14, 2008.
"Hughes is the first poet of the will to live"
- Calvin Bedient, in his book Eight Contemporary Poets (1974)
- Named Poet Laureate oif England in 1984
- Elected to the Order of Merit (An honor given to individuals of great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature, and science)
- Buried in Westminster Abbey
- Married to the late Sylvia Plath