“... everything with specks of faintest green & blue. They made no sound, no shriek, no Whoo! While Ted Hughes, say, might have managed to make a convincing poem out of this visionary glimpse into the collective unconscious, Bishop found herself unable to do much with these mysterious archetypes. ‘This scarcely counts, as poetry,’ she admitted to ...”

“... and liked and so on.The ‘Review’ never nurtured any of the people who became big names: say, Ted Hughes?He predated it. They all did. Ted Hughes had a reputation by the end of the 1950s. So, too, did Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin. There was nobody new worth nurturing apart from the people we published in the early ...”

“... is more easily assented to than followed. The classic account of imprisonment by admiration is Ted Solotaroff’s essay, ‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’ (1970), which antedates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence by three years. There, Solotaroff shows how the aspiring writer’s mind, locked in the cell of its preconceptions, receives visits from ...”

“... we should expect Keats to represent that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will obviously vary from writer to writer and ...”

“... is registered with the deep and appalled fascination with which Pater regarded the Mona Lisa or Ted Hughes his jaguar, and she remains just as much a closed book: ‘Strange she is, and secret;/Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold seashells.’ The romance is giddy and the joke is on the lover: ‘clearly a very ordinary sort of girl in a ...”

“... up to the south door, only later realising it wasn’t lichen but chewing gum. 23 March. That Ted Hughes should have got into Poets’ Corner ahead of Larkin wouldn’t have surprised Larkin, though he must surely have a better claim. Two deans back, and not long after Larkin’s death, I remember Michael Mayne saying that Larkin had earned his place ...”

“... certainly been good at it. She was saved by adopting her mother’s sense of humour.O’HAGAN: Ted Hughes seemed to excite her mother. The letters between them included in Shawcross’s book are hilarious. She had a sort of imaginary, pet name for him, the Rev. Cedric Potter, I believe it was. In one of her letters to him she asked if he thought the ...”

“... Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day Lewis, a career poet and professor). There are in fact two versions of the ...”

“... its taste for the civilities of the Movement, and was sinking its fangs into a red-blooded diet of Ted Hughes. The vogue for immediacy bound up with that Sixties idiom encouraged onomatopoeic excesses which haven’t weathered well.The well-made, articulate manner of the early verse is often associated with the tutelage of Philip Hobsbaum, who ran a ...”

“... green is the tree of life.’ Carey sometimes takes this line: it lies behind his admiration for Ted Hughes, for instance, whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets under his skin is intellectuals being snobby and condescending, and in his impressively ...”

“... passions was a medical student, Ben Richards, who is pictured in the book looking remarkably like Ted Hughes – who was almost Wittgenstein’s contemporary at Cambridge. Wittgenstein died in 1951: had he survived a year or two to coincide with Hughes it would have been an interesting conjunction. One anachronism (I ...”

“... as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is ...”

“... only playing bit-parts in the story, and this includes the victor of the by-election, Simon Hughes, who makes his one-line appearance on page 148. ‘Simon Hughes is an average Liberal candidate with all the political deficiencies this implies.’ For most of Tatchell’s anticipated audience his will appear adequate ...”

“... by 1974, including Doris Lessing, Raymond Williams, Anthony Burgess, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis and the adamantine Murdoch. In 1979, the Public Lending Right was passed by Parliament (today, authors receive around 9.55p per loan, capped at £6,600 a year). Then Duffy dumped Brophy.Logic might have felt like a sturdy pedestal ...”

“... never met her, Stevie Smith and her work are draped in Palmers Greenery. Would a biographer of Hughes call him Ted? It is not easy to write a forceful narrative about a woman who never changed her house, her job or her companion. From the age of three, when her father ran away to sea – prompted, one poem suggests, by a ...”