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’.
The pike has been condemned. The Virgin, dipping her lily in the lough, decreed it. This is no precinct for anything fishy That revives the underhang of the Dragon.
He fell asleep in Job. He woke in The Book of Vermin.
And in the Courts of Beauty-care and Cosmetics His picture is pinned up – as the criminal norm. No trial for those eyes. No appeal For that mouth. And flesh of such...
How it hung In the electrical loom Of the Himalayas – I remember The spectre of the rose.
All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.
In The Shah’s Motel The Manageress – a thunder head Atossa – wept on her bed Or struck awe. Tragic Persian Quaked her bosoms – precarious balloons of water. But still nothing worked.
Everything hung on a prayer, in the...
Sing the hole’s plume, the rafter’s cockade Who melts from the eye-corner, the soft squealer Pointed at both ends, who chews through lead
Sing the scholarly meek face Of the penniless rat Who studies all night To inherit the house
Sing the riff-raff of the roof-space, who dance till dawn Sluts in silk, sharpers with sleek moustaches Dancing the cog-roll, the belly-bounce, the...
We came where the salmon were so many So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed On their inner map, England could add
Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters Till the world had seemed capsizing slowly.
Solemn to stand there in the pollen light Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed As from the hand of God. There the body
Separated, golden and...
He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety. Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak, Half under a tangle of brambles.
After his two thousand miles, he rests, Breathing in that lap of easy current In his graveyard pool.
About six pounds weight, Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea – But already a veteran, Already a...
Alice Oswald talks about the poetry of Ted Hughes, with help from recordings of his readings at New York's 92nd Street Y
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...
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 –...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
‘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...
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,...
The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...
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...
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...
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