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“... or eccentric or somewhat controversial deceased or elderly relatives than great poets-in-waiting. Ted Hughes already feels like a rumour. It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough. (Can it be ...”

“... Kate’s set comprises characters such as Hugo Mainwaring, a one-armed political journalist, and Ted Stennett, a doctor and one of Kate’s ten or so named lovers. Ted’s wife is Evelyn, a social worker. Kate used to be married to Stuart, who now lives, amiably separated, in a basement, painting mould and rust in advanced ...”

“... of cuisine and literacy. The photograph-poem has become an important sub-genre. Larkin, Hughes, Porter and others have practised it. There’s a sense in which the photograph does part of the poet’s work for him, freezing a charged but vanishing moment so that nuances of mood or relationship, by definition volatile, become permanently fixed for ...”

“... demands it, which debilitates spontaneity. His letter to Reid, for example, on his edition of Ted Hughes’s letters, echoes the address to readers at the start of Shakespeare’s First Folio, cites Keats and Frost, and orchestrates a chorus of acclaim. His friendship with Hughes was close and important. The ...”

“... sound arch and trivial beside the delicacy and desolation of Porter’s. Beside it, too, Ted Hughes’s fine early poem ‘Six Young Men’ (‘Six months after this picture they were all dead’) lacks a whole dimension of personal suffering. Carol Rumens’s Unplayed Music also contains a photograph-poem, ‘Before these wars’. It is about ...”

“... Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary KBR; or the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based global investment firm, of which Baker is ...”

“... as your feelings. There is no room in this tradition for a poem about sexual compulsion such as Ted Hughes’s ‘A Childish Prank’. Instead of Hughes, we get (three times) Kingsley Amis’s nonplussed Evans, who straight after his father’s funeral arranges to meet his mistress in the pub: You’ll know me ...”

“... right about the decline of what Virginia Woolf called ‘frock consciousness’ in literature. Ted Hughes’s ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, from Birthday Letters, which Watt includes, is an account of his and Sylvia Plath’s wedding. She wore what the title suggests, but beyond repeating the phrase twice within the poem ...”

“... at Harvard and Radcliffe that set her on the path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following ...”

“... the iron cage of partisan constraint. In early 1974 Britain seemed divided and ungovernable, with Ted Heath’s Conservative government blown off course by the miners’ strike. In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million ...”

“... the studio side, many producers followed, though with less fuss, the protocol indicated by Howard Hughes when he shut down RKO for six months in 1949 and deployed his project I Married a Communist as a test for weeding out subversives. Thirteen directors turned it down. A rare missing detail in Hoberman’s story is a footnote on the subsequent fortunes of ...”

“... a question about federal procedure, and knew that Coffee had clerked for a federal judge – Sarah Hughes, who was instrumental in securing Texan women the right to serve on juries, though she’ll always be most famous for swearing in Lyndon Johnson as president on Air Force One after Kennedy’s assassination. Weddington belonged to a network that illegally ...”

“... Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile and singers and dance troupes from Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. Despite his scepticism about ...”

“... Falling victim to the American joke, the young Ellison embarrassed himself and his host Langston Hughes by laughing loudly and uncontrollably – stopping the Broadway show of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre – at the sexual grotesqueries of white trash; the shock of seeing the blackface stereotype of physicalised excess transferred to poor whites ...”

“... I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey was an odd mixture, with a surprising number of old aristocratic biddies (the oldest being the Queen Mother), and society (the dead poet’s society, I suppose) well represented. It’s no secret that the ...”