Ted Hughes

Born on August 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, a mill town in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, Edward James Hughes grew up in a landscape of moorland and rain that would saturate his poetry with animal violence and elemental force. His father, William, was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment at Gallipoli, and the shadow of that slaughter haunted the family. Hughes won an open exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read English before switching to Archaeology and Anthropology, disciplines that fed his fascination with myth and the primitive. At a party in Cambridge on February 25, 1956, he met the American poet Sylvia Plath; they married four months later. His first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), announced a voice of raw, predatory power , poems in which jaguars, hawks, and thrushes became vehicles for exploring instinct and mortality. Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967) deepened this vision, while Crow (1970) , a sequence of trickster poems drawing on global mythology , marked his most radical departure. After Plath’s suicide in February 1963, Hughes endured decades of public vilification, a burden compounded by the suicide of his partner Assia Wevill and their daughter Shura in 1969. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984. His final major work, Birthday Letters (1998) , eighty-eight poems addressed directly to Plath, written over twenty-five years in secret , broke a silence that had defined his public life. He died of colon cancer on October 28, 1998, in London, just months after the book’s publication.

At Cambridge, stuck at two in the morning on a critical essay, Hughes dreamed a fox walked upright into his room, badly burned, and laid a bloodied hand on his blank page. 'Stop this,' it told him, 'you are destroying us.' He soon abandoned English literature for archaeology and anthropology.