“... dropping bombshells about the teachers. Not since the late Queen Mother’s letters to the late Ted Hughes – where she liked to imagine a marriage between a fictional ‘Miss Dimsdale’ and a fictional ‘Reverend Potter’ – has such childish nonsense clambered the walls of mini-history. Here is Isherwood settling down to explain how it is when ...”

“... features none of the planetary collisions, the cheek-chewing grand guignol of the legend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There are no treaties with dark gods to be unpacked into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge ...”

“... and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto ...”

“... poem unfamiliar. There is no place today where his poetry obviously lives, as there is, say, a Ted Hughes county and a Seamus Heaney land, a place domesticated by poets. Keats said that Hampstead had been ‘damned’ by Leigh Hunt, and the Lakes by Wordsworth. For Larkin elsewhere can only be completely authentic (‘a real girl in a real ...”

“... Among her close friends had been Assia Wevill, who in 1969 murdered the daughter she had had with Ted Hughes then killed herself. Jannice was also fascinated by the story of the artist Dora Carrington, another suicide. Worried about the situation, Porter accompanied his wife to a psychoanalyst, but the encounter was disastrous. Jannice refused to go ...”

“... forward to crucial developments in our own century – not only to artists like Mann, Eliot or Ted Hughes, but to psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This hardly looks like evidence for Lucy Beckett’s claim that Wagner is a ‘naive artist’ who ‘gives us myth straight’: on the contrary, it provides further support for Syberberg’s ...”

“... be enough. (Kray being the Anglicised form of Krähe, the German for ‘crow’. Tell that to Ted Hughes.) The Bethnal Green labyrinth was still guarded at each of its four corners by pub signs bearing the portraits of birds, but the missing tie had undone all the familial superstitions. Reg was divided from Ron. The chicken-entrail voodoo of the ...”

“... the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers for a generation. So where did it all go wrong? (Not for the poets, for us.) Raworth’s first proper book, The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in 1967. Three illustrations by Barry ...”

“... drama that is to be found in Fighting Terms. Gunn’s first Selected, a volume shared with Ted Hughes, came out in 1962, when he had published only three books of poetry. It was to sell more than eighty thousand copies. The original idea was also to include Philip Larkin, a poet both Gunn and Hughes admired ...”

“... a picture of itself. Clearly, the poem in my eye and mind is not the poem that Keats or Lowell or Ted Hughes wrote, however absolute and real an artefact it may seem to be: but this is like saying that I am not really seeing a coloured surface but only a refraction of atoms that gives the appearance of colour, etc. The truth of art is the truth of ...”

“... out the extremes of emotion. ‘I care, deeply,’ Crow says, having flown out of the pages of Ted Hughes to land on the widower’s shoulder. ‘I find humans dull except in grief.’ Like Toothwort, he is simultaneously a psychic, imaginary and material thing. ‘There was a rich smell of decay,’ Crow thinks, ‘a sweet furry stink of ...”

“... blast a recording of Sylvia Plath, while downstairs her father plays, equally loudly, a record of Ted Hughes reading Crow. The wedding dress, poor chattel, suffers the usual fate of the special frock in a family of daughters: Justine borrows it, wears it to college parties, then somehow loses it, in that weird way one does seem to lose all one’s best ...”

“... for journalism and academic use alike – to subsume the period under two poets, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Their contemporaries can then be located at intervals on the line stretching between these two not wholly imaginary points, with Robert Lowell appearing now at one end, then at the other. An ill effect of this rough-and-ready schematism is that ...”

“... section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with the telltale compression of ...”

“... I heard that moral qualifier Doris used almost automatically and almost always for a man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my ...”