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“... as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal.The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those ...”

“... which was used to ward off chaos. The military theme in his work fits into this picture. Like Ted Hughes, one of his major influences, Longley had a father who fought in the First World War and the imagery of the Somme – corpses, helmets, gas-masks – keeps on turning up in his Irish landscapes. Anyone who digs around Longley’s poems is liable ...”

“... the poets I came across were the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at the University ...”

“... projector. The film is dim and desaturated. Hamburger talks about his apples, and about some pips Ted Hughes once gave him – ‘a kind of link between us’. In a different world, Merce Cunningham in his Bethune Street studio, performing – six times, on six separate screens – what could have been his final piece of dance: a rendering, in perfect ...”

“... me to move. The last books pages I’d worked on at the Observer lay beside me (Ian Hamilton and Ted Hughes on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and ...”

“... as lucid when trying something new as he is when performing more conventionally on Hardy, Waugh, Ted Hughes and Tom Wolfe. It’s to be hoped, then, that readers won’t be put off this civil and modestly adventurous book by the jokes and sneers of the smart, dismissive reviewers into whose hands anything of this kind is likely to fall. The two I have ...”

“... nothing from Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (Dunn is allowed only two poems, and is confused with Ted Hughes in the Introduction). At times the theory which seems to underlie this book is stronger than its actual contents. This is an anthology of Scottish poetry without ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea’; without William ...”

“... naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert Graves and about Keith ...”

“... is another false light, while not responding to Day Lewis. When the time came, he saw the point of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, for all the latter’s youthful scorn. Seamus Heaney he describes as ‘a man of immense good will’ who ‘wrote poems which are models of what we might call the late Georgian Yeatsian Irish peasant’. Here is the sentence of a ...”

“... sextet playing Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke and a stentorian reading from Ecclesiastes by Ted Hughes. Jill Balcon read a selection of Larkin’s verse, including ‘Church Going’. I couldn’t recall whether any mention was made of Larkin’s fear of death and his certainty that it meant oblivion, but the order of service, available in the ...”

“... Douglas’s standing could be said to have approached its present eminence. The ministrations of Ted Hughes, a tough guy too, had much to do with Douglas’s ascent (Hughes found in him ‘the burning away of all human pretensions in the ray cast by death’), and so did the labours of his assiduous ...”

“... over all goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ...”

“... predecessors as much as nature itself are the sources of his metamorphosising imagination. Unlike Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney, he has never felt the need to make his diction coincide with the rugged or violent nature he depicts. In a previously uncollected poem, ‘A Kind of People’, he writes: Umbrellas and parasols, Like old navy raincoats, Sewing ...”

“... by Samuel Beckett (who was a childhood friend of Molly Howe’s), Paul Goodman, James Merrill, Ted Hughes and Kenneth Koch, as well as numerous Noh plays and classics such as The Changeling, in which Lang took the role of the bawdy chambermaid. In 1952 and 1954 respectively, the troupe performed Lang’s own two verse plays, Fire Exit and I Too Have ...”

“... genres of modern art: in sculpture by Moore, in paintings by Bacon, in poems and stories by Ted Hughes. It must symbolise reason and consciousness savagely violated, a violent disabling of understanding, direction and care. Is that dreamy beheading of the absent kindly mother who haunts the benighted England of Penny Links meant to carry such ...”