Ted hughes biography bate

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
His biography is a first report on what lies in wait in the archive.

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Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times

‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The Times

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship,

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Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

March 23, 2021

When Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters in 1998 it became the fastest selling work of poetry in history. Critics were astounded, readers old and young were converted, prizes were scooped. Comparisons were drawn with erupting volcanoes. There was a feeling of immense pressure forcing the poems upwards, outwards. These were poems that had to be written. The story of how that pressure gathered and why is the burden of this engaging biography.

Though not the first biography of Ted Hughes, it is the most detailed. The journey it traces from Number 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd to Buckingham Palace is remarkable. Like his close friend Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes' parents were neither wealthy nor highly educated and lived far from the centres of power. Nearly all their street's houses were made of millstone grit, stained by over a century of industry. A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table for washing.

There were compensations. Hughes' Mother Edith was something of a mystic, complaining since childhood of spectral hands t

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The Deauthorised Life of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
by Jonathan Bate.
Harper, 2015.
Hardcover, 672 pages, $40.

Every biography has a backstory involving how a biographer turns to a certain subject, what other biographies have been written, what sources are new or used differently. Jonathan Bate set out to write an authorized biography of Ted Hughes, poet laureate, winner of most of the important poetry prizes, and still best known as Sylvia Plath’s husband and the man who left her for another woman. Except for Anne Stevenson’s authorized biography of Plath—and some kind words for Diana Middlebrook and Andrew Wilson, who have published truncated biographical narratives—Bate adopts the attitude Janet Malcolm demonstrated in The Silent Women, which derogates the Plath biographers as an unsavory gang who have traduced Ted Hughes, treating him as one of the primary contributors to a great poet’s suicide.

Bate does not divulge in his biography that his original plan was to take on-side Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol Orchard, promising her that he would write a