Hughes, Ted

Ted Hughes, byname of Edward J. Hughes, (born August 17, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England—died October 28, 1998, London), English poet whose most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.

At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple moved to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published. Other works soon followed, including the highly praised Lupercal (1960) and Selected Poems (1962, with Thom Gunn, a poet whose work is frequently associated with Hughes’s as marking a new turn in English verse).

Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated the previous year), but thereafter he published prolifically, with volumes of poetry such as Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Wolfwatching (1989), and New Selected Poems, 1957–1994 (1995). In his Birthday Letters (1998), he addressed his relationship with Plath after decades of silence. As the executor of her estate, Hughes also edited and published several volumes of her work in the period 1965–98, but he was accused of censoring her writings after he revealed that he had destroyed several journals that she had written before her suicide.

Hughes wrote many books for children, notably The Iron Man (1968; also published as The Iron Giant; film 1999). Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood, is one of many publications he created in collaboration with photographers and artists. He translated Georges Schehadé’s play The Story of Vasco from the original French and shaped it into a libretto. The resulting opera, from which significant portions of his text were cut, premiered in 1974. A play based on Hughes’s original libretto was staged in 2009. His works also include an adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), nonfiction (Winter Pollen, 1994), and translations. He edited many collections of poetry, such as The Rattle Bag (1982, with Seamus Heaney). A collection of his correspondence, edited by Christopher Reid, was released in 2007 as Letters of Ted Hughes. A selection of his poems concerning animal life was published as A Ted Hughes Bestiary (2014). In 1984 Hughes was appointed Britain’s poet laureate.