Ted Hughes was born on August 17th 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. His first book of poetry was published in 1957, and was followed by titles such as Lupercal (1960), Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970) and Birthday Letters (1998). In 1984, Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate, a position in which he remained until his death on October 28th, 1998. Hughes also wrote numerous children’s books, as well as occasional prose and interpretations of Euripides, Aeschylus, Seneca and Garcia Lorca.

Hughes’s poetry is not easily defined. Throughout his poetic career, he has remained close to nature, depicting a world sometimes intolerably cruel, sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful. Hughes saw the poet as a shaman, someone who, on behalf of the society, plunged into his own psyche to find universal truths. Consequently, Hughes’s poetry sometimes seemed violent to the general reader.

Hughes, as Keith Sagar once said, spoke poetry as his first language. In his poetry he drabbled with subjects most of his contemporaries dared not, or cared not to, even touch.

Poetry, for Hughes, was magic. It was a way to reach truth, truth that was often painful, but brought with it a sense of elation, even exultation, like the catharsis is the Greek tragedies. Hughes poetry is not poetry to simply read. It is poetry that widens your eyes, your heart and your intellect – poetry, as Sagar has beautifully put it, to be possessed by.

Text by Agnes

The name of this fanlisting "The Art of Ted Hughes" is taken from the book of the same name by Keith Sagar, first published in 1975.

We are (sadly) in no way connected to either Ted Hughes or Keith Sagar, this is just a fansite.