Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
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Edward James Hughes (Ted) was born in the village of Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire in 1930. After a life in Literature during which he rose to become England's Poet Laureate, he died at the age of sixty eight in a London hospital while receiving treatment for colon cancer. He had received the prestigious Order of Merit just a few weeks before.
Hughes's birthplace in Mytholmroyd
At Ted Hughes's funeral in Devon, another giant of post-war poetry, Seamus Heaney, said this:-
"No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken."
A fine tribute.
ReplyDeleteFrieda (Ted's daughter) was at the Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey
on May 13 1999.
Also present: Heaney, Andrew Motion, Alan Sillitoe, Ruth Fainlight, Grey Gowrie, Blake Morrison, Simon Armitage, Susha Guppy, Michael Baldwin.
At Cambridge Ted rose at 6 a.m. and read a Shakespeare play every day.
Sylvia Plath whom he married in 1956 told her mother he knew the Bard by heart.
SHAKESPEARE & THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING is his Shakespeare book.
Ted's only son, Nicholas, took his own life on 16 March 2009. He was 47.
P.J. Kavanagh (1931-2015) wrote a poem critical of Ted Hughes.
DeleteThe poem is titled - Consolations.
See Kavanagh's collection, EDWARD THOMAS IN HEAVEN (1974).
Kavanagh was puzzled by the bleak view of nature in Hughes.
* He even has it in for starlings, * is the line I remember.
CROW is a grim book written after Sylvia's suicide and the suicide
of Ted's second wife Assia Wevill who took their little girl with her.
Kavanagh was a big presence like Ted. A countryman.
He lived in a farm cottage outside Cirencester with his wife and
two sons. He wrote a wonderful memoir, The Perfect Stranger.
He's not to be confused with the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.
The two poets met in a Dublin pub.
Patrick said to his younger namesake, * Change your fecking name ! *
Those poets can certainly give each other good obituary.
ReplyDeleteThe poem you chose is a good example of power and strength.
ReplyDeleteThis is a beautiful and very moving poem and much more accessible than those of my first cousin twice removed.
ReplyDelete"A tower of tenderness and strength" - a beautiful way to describe a person.
ReplyDeleteHe was a brilliant poet, scarred somewhat by the death of his first wife. You need only see his grave to understand that. 'Thought Fox' is a favourite of mine as also 'Pike'. I once saw a pike (and all its teeth) caught and we had it for a meal, it tasted very muddy.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of him but the poem is really beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI know I shouldn't judge a poet on his life but I can't help but think of his infidelities when he was married to Sylvia Plath. I know, I know. I am sure it was quite complicated.
ReplyDeleteThat stanza about the fox really gets to me.
ReplyDeleteThe melancholy of the transition from autumn to winter shows how quickly time flies.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting that poem. Very bittersweet.
ReplyDelete