Ted Hughes (1930-1998) - byname of Edward J. Hughes
English poet, dramatist, critic, and short story writer, married to the American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Hughes stated that poems, like animals, are each one 'an assembly of living parts, moved by a single spirit.' In his early works he presented a sardonic view of man's function in the universal scheme, and continued the theme of survival, the power and the mystery of the cosmos, and the war between vitality and death, in several of his later collections. SNOWDROP
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
More through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal. Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, a small town in the north of England. The harsh landscape of the Yorkshire moors had a strong influence in Hughes's poetry. His father was a carpenter and shopkeeper. He had participated during the World War I in the battle of Gallipoli, and was one of the 17 who survived from his regiment. After studies at the Mexborough Grammar School, Hughes served two years in the Royal Air Force. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, Hughes studied first English and then switched to archaeology and anthropology. He graduated in 1954 and moved to London, where he worked as a zoo attendant, gardener, and script reader for J. Arthur Rank. In Cambridge Hughes founded with his friends a literary magazine St Botolph's Review. There he also met an unknown poet, Sylvia Plath. They married within a few months. In 1957 they moved to the US where Hughes taught English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1957 Hughes published his first volume of verse, THE HAWK IN THE RAIN, which included some of his best poems, such as 'The Thought-Fox' and the title poems, 'The Hawk in the Rain'. It was followed by PIKE (1959) and LUPERCAL (1960), which won a Somerset Maugham Award (1960) and the 1961 Hawthornden Prize. Hughes's collection SELECTED POEMS (1962), with Thom Gunn, is considered a new turn in English verse. Hughes and Plath returned to England in 1959 and in 1961 they moved to Devon. After Sylvia Plath's suicide in London in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry for nearly three years while editing and publishing Plath's poems.