Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes’s first collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957; his last, Birthday Letters, in 1998, the year he died. John Bayley, writing in the LRB, described his long poem Gaudete (1977) as ‘one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry’.

Poem: ‘Sacrifice’

Ted Hughes, 24 January 1985

Little One Too Many – Born at the bottom of the heap. The baby daughter’s doll. She trailed after the others, lugging him.

Little One Too Many grew up With a strangely wrinkled brow – fold on fold Like the Tragic Mask. Cary Grant was his living double.

They said: when he was little he’d drop And kick and writhe, and kick and cry: ‘I’ll break my leg,...

Two Poems

Ted Hughes, 15 November 1984

Walt

Night after night he’d sat there, Eighty-four, still telling the tale. With his huge thirst for anaesthetics. ‘Time I were dead,’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’

That’s altered.               We lean to a cliff rail Founded in tremblings. Beneath us, two thousand five hundred Miles...

Poem: ‘Daffodils’

Ted Hughes, 1 March 1984

I’d bought a bit of wild ground. In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned. A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently.

It was a gilding of the Deeds – treasure trove! Daffodils just came. And they kept on coming –

‘Blown foam,’ I wrote. ‘Vessels of light!’ They ran under every gust On the earth-surge, ‘their six-bladed screws Churning...

Poem: ‘The Gulkana’

Ted Hughes, 19 May 1983

The Gulkana – where it meets the Copper – Swung out of the black spruce forest, on a pebbly bend, And disappeared into it, Hazed with forest fires that had burned for weeks.

Strange word: ‘Gulkana’. What did it mean? A pre-Columbian glyph. A pale, blue line, scrawled with a childish hand Through our crumpled map. It was water More than water, rocks that were more than...

Poem: ‘A Sparrow-Hawk’

Ted Hughes, 17 March 1983

Slips from the eye-corner – overtaking Your first thought.

Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth The sun’s cooled carbon wing Whets the eyebeam.

Those eyes in their helmet Still wired direct To the nuclear core – they alone

Laser the lark-shaped hole In the lark’s song.

We find the earth-tied spurs, among soft ashes. And maybe we find him

Materialised by...

Half-Fox: Ted Hughes

Seamus Perry, 29 August 2013

Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about...

Read more reviews

Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...

Read more reviews

‘I was there, I saw it’: Ted Hughes

Ian Sansom, 19 February 1998

Captain Hook, ‘cadaverous and blackavised’, ‘never more sinister than when he is most polite’, lives in fear of the crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock....

Read more reviews

He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to...

Read more reviews

Godmother of the Salmon

John Bayley, 9 July 1992

The worst of being dubbed Laureate today would not be the task of composing poems for royal and public occasions, but trying to make them sound like oneself, or even more so. Auden had no...

Read more reviews

Protestant Guilt

Tom Paulin, 9 April 1992

There is a particular type of literary criticism – these days very rare – that aims to exist intensely as bravura performance, dramatic spectacle. It would be pointless to object that...

Read more reviews

What the doctor said

Edna Longley, 22 March 1990

Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...

Read more reviews

The New Narrative

John Kerrigan, 16 February 1984

‘When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what...

Read more reviews

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...

Read more reviews

Cambridge Theatre

Donald Davie, 19 August 1982

Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do,...

Read more reviews

Prize Poems

Donald Davie, 1 July 1982

The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...

Read more reviews

War and Pax

Claude Rawson, 2 July 1981

Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a...

Read more reviews

Facts and Makings

John Bayley, 21 February 1980

Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences