Plath’s Influence The one poet who had the greatest impact on Hughes was the same poet on whom he had the greatest impact—Sylvia Plath. Plath and Hughes encouraged one another to strive for more complex and personal expression and to explore with great honesty themes of longing, memory, and identity. After Plath’s death, Hughes edited and promoted her writing (as well as destroying some of it to protect their children, as he claimed), and his last major work was a collection of poems he wrote about their life together titled Birthday Letters.

Works in Critical Context

Ted Hughes enjoyed a rapid rise to fame, thanks in part to a prestigious poetry contest he won at the age of twenty-seven. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was picked up by a major publisher in England and the United States in 1957 and received very favorable reviews. Critics were impressed by the surprisingly confident and mature poetic voice of the young poet.

There were some misfires in Hughes’s career. One was his collaboration with theater director Peter Brook, Orghast, which was written and performed in Iran. Hughes created an entirely new language with the intention of communicating emotionally, beneath the level of logical comprehension. Another critical failure was his narrative poem Gaudete (1977), a grim and poorly constructed tale of a priest who is replaced with an evil double who seduces his parishioners into a sexual cult.

Hughes has also received criticism from Sylvia Plath’s devoted readers, some of whom would boo at Hughes’s readings, blaming him for her depression and suicide. Judged on its own merits, however, Hughes’s poetry for adults has consistently received favorable reviews, and even those critics who find it unnecessarily violent or pessimistic still appreciate its vigor and technical virtuosity.

Hughes received many honors for his children’s writing, including the Kurt Maschler Award, the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction, and, on three occasions, the Signal Poetry Award. In assessing Hughes’s contributions as a children’s writer, critic and editor Keith Cushman noted the continuity between his work for younger and older readers, especially in his later years, when poetry for children was an integral part of Hughes’s overall artistic achievement. Cushman writes, ‘‘The effort to reach the child’s imagination with poetry, to nurture it, to preserve it and keep it whole, must be recognized as being of paramount importance to the literary faith of Ted Hughes.’’

Responses to Literature

1. How did Sylvia Plath influence Ted Hughes’s life and work? How did he influence hers?

2. Read Hughes’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. Do you find the crow to be symbolic, or do think the poems are more meaningful if the crow is just a crow?

3. Is poetry about nature more or less relevant in our time, with the rise of cities and the spread of suburbs? What new perspectives can nature poetry take, and how has Hughes’s work contributed to that?

4. How do archeology and anthropology influence Hughes’s work?

CONTEXTUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD LITERATURE

Books

Feinstein, Elaine. Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet. New

York: Norton, 2003. Gifford, Terry and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical

Study. London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Hirschberg, Stuart. Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes: A

Guide to the Poems. Portmarnock, Ireland:

Wolfhound Press, 1981. Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted

Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. Roberts, Neil. Ted Hughes: A Literary Life. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes, enlarged edition.

Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1978. Scigaj, Leonard M. The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and

Imagination. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa

Press, 1986. Scigaj, Leonard M., ed. Critical Essays on Ted Hughes.

New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Wilson, Jane. Backing Horses: A Comparison between

Larkin’s and Hughes’ Poetry. Potree, Scotland:

Aquila, 1982.

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