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: ‘Nymet’

Ted Hughes, 4 December 1980

No map or Latin ever

Netted one deity from this river. TAW meant simply ‘water’. What became of her Who poured these pools from her ewer?

Who wove her names for her people Into a shimmery tent – with alder and oak-leaf

And the flowing deer? What were her real names?

She painted men’s and women’s souls Into her tunnel water With the brother-blood of raven and...

Two Poems

Ted Hughes, 2 October 1980

Eagle

Big wings dawns dark. The sun is hunting. Thunder collects, under granite eyebrows.

The horizons are ravenous. The dark mountain has an electric eye. The sun lowers its meat-hook.

His spread fingers measure a heaven, then a heaven. His ancestors worship only him And his children’s children cry to him alone.

His trapeze is a continent. The sun is looking for fuel With the gaze of a...

Poem: ‘Nightjar’

Ted Hughes, 15 May 1980

The tree creeps on its knees. The dead branch aims, in the last light. The cat-bird is telescopic.

The sun’s escape Shudders shot By wings of ashes.

The moon falls, with all its moths, Into a bird’s face.

Stars spark From the rasp of its cry.

Till the moon-eater, cooling, Yawns dawn And sleeps bark.

Two Poems

Ted Hughes, 21 February 1980

Unfinished Mystery

Enter Hamlet, stabbed, no longer baffled, Stepping across his mother, drowned in a pearl, Carrying lifeless Ophelia. Now enter

Stabbed Othello, enlightened at last, From his cistern of toad-genderings, bearing Suffocated Desdemona. Now enter

Headless Macbeth, regicide killed in him, Stepping from the cauldron of sisters Bearing his cold Queen. Now enter

Crack-brained Lear,...

Poem: ‘Night Arrival of Sea-Trout’

Ted Hughes, 25 October 1979

Honeysuckle hanging its fangs. Foxglove rearing its opened belly. Dogrose touching the membrane.

And through the dew’s mist, the oak’s mass Comes plunging, comes tossing dark antlers.

Then a shattering Of the river’s hole, where something leaps out –

The stillness snarls, moon-mouthed, and shivers.

Summer dripping stars, biting at the nape. Lob-worms coupling in...

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...

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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 –...

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‘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....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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