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“... remained friends. Coming to Devon in the winter of 1998 on my last-ever circuit, I wrote to ask Ted and Carol Hughes, whom I did not know, to dinner. In early October Ted Hughes replied: Normally we would both be delighted to accept, but a combination of circumstances make ...”

“... race meetings [who] ... belong to the world of the RSPCA’) with the ‘urgent’ horses of Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’, a poem ‘unquestionably about something’. Linked in this way, the poems make each other look slightly ridiculous – their titles alone adequately inform us what they are ‘about’ – though each on its own is a ...”

“... was her; she was also the loved one cast away like ashes in the wind. Newman doesn’t discuss Ted Hughes but the contrast between Plath’s knife-edge relationship with clothes and Hughes’s appearance of being made out of his subject matter, heavy corduroy, moleskin and leather, is surely telling. He was so ...”

“... poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and Hughes enjoy; it’s not clear he has aspired to ...”

“... natural spirit with which he wrote them.’ Though it lacks Hazlitt’s momentum and flexibility, Ted Hughes’s prose has a similarly vehement enthusiasm, a pulsing directness that makes him testify to ‘the simple immediacy and as it were natural inevitability’ with which his idea of Shakespeare’s Tragic Equation grew in his mind, ‘and which is ...”

“... he urges us to be more exclusive: Let us not prefer Ashbery to Yeats, Let us not suppose T. Hughes, On shining floors, Goes waltzing with a lyrical Muse. But the rebuke comes in verse which itself should stand rebuked. It is a pity that Grigson, a good poet in a context in which achievement is likely to be occasional at best, spends so much spirit in ...”

“... off tentative jottings as whole poems. Yehuda Amichai, ‘Israel’s foremost poet’, roped in Ted Hughes in order to help with the translation of his vapid collection, Time. Was the idea that Hughes should make sure that Amichai avoided making a fool of himself? If so, what about the following? I lay in the dry ...”

“... more amusing moments were provided by my foreign colleagues. Two days after I arrived in Adelaide, Ted Hughes and Adrian Mitchell were scheduled to arrive from London, and there was a slight panic among the organisers when neither of them showed up at his hotel at the appointed hour. News finally arrived that, yes, they had in fact arrived at the airport ...”

“... Bowes-Lyon could get very caught up in the swooshiness of poetry. She loved going fishing with Ted Hughes. In the long boring afternoons in the Highlands, the hours between kippers and drinkies, poor Ted would take her down to the river and start Yorkshiring on about the trees. One comes away from William ...”

“... of the pudding. These four new volumes from Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes, Morton Paley and Ted Hughes work to restore the plums to their proper context. Ashton’s biography reminds us how thoroughly and often unhappily the poet was also the son, the brother, the orphan, the husband and the father; she weighs neurotic disability against freedom ...”

“... of God to earth’. Such portraits undercut the serious, ‘natural’ masculinity in poets like Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence, who may seem like soft targets now. Yet the same poems pursue more difficult truths about bodies in general: we, like our cows, are made of calcium and hormones, gums and bones, even as we are made of hope and anomie, which ...”

“... to be deserving, including Eusden, Pye and Austin; here a neat piece of editorial work gets Ted Hughes into the list. The needs and assumptions of the reading public, and the taste of editors, have changed since 1932, and the surprising thing no doubt is that so much of the old book was worth keeping. One finds these fairly typical changes of ...”

“... and has a pervasively elegiac feel. The poems for or about recently dead friends and poets (Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown) tend to be wide-ranging meditations on literature and language.In his criticism as well as his poetry, Heaney has always excelled at finding metaphors of process for the ...”

“... shooting,’ Michael told the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead, ‘we would be in our trailers reading Ted Hughes.’ By then they had already decided, together, to make poetry their primary work: their first books appeared in 2008 (Matthew) and 2009 (Michael), from the same publisher, Copper Canyon, which would later publish a collaboration between them ...”

“... to remedy this, promoting such new arrivals on the literary scene as William Golding, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, all of whom soon became effectively canonised by their presence on school syllabuses. Critical Quarterly was committed to the centrality of poetry, fiction and drama to the living language, and to a conception of ...”