Ted Hughes

At 68 years old, Ted Hughes physical status not available right now. We will update Ted Hughes's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Edward James Hughes (17 August 1930 – October 28, 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer.

Critics often rate him as one of the best writers of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

From 1984 to his death, he served as Poet Laureate.

Hughes was ranked fourth on the Times' list of "The 50 Greatest British writers since 1945" from 1956 to her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30.

Some Plath supporters and feminist commentators blamed him for her death after the publication of letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and February 1963, which claim that Hughes beat Plath two days before she had a miscarriage in 1961, and that he later told Plath that he wished she was dead.

Birthday Letters (1998), his last poetic work, delves into their complicated love.

These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but no one addresses specifically the causes of her death.

"Last Letter," a poem that was published in October 2010, recounts what happened during the three days leading up to her death.

Early life

Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894-1991) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898-1989) and spent time on the Pennine moorland. Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016) was two years older, and his brother Gerald (1920–2016) was ten years older. The Little Gidding community had been established by one of his mother's ancestors.

The bulk of his family's more recent generations had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. William Hughes, a joiner of Irish descent, enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and war at Ypres, and was based in Ypres. He barely survived being killed after a bullet was stuck in a pay book in his breast pocket. He was one of only 17 men of his regiment to recover from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915-2016). Hughes' childhood imagination was piqued by the tales of Flanders fields (later described in the poem "Out"). "My first six years shaped everything," Hughes said.

Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended Burnley Road School until he was seven years old before his family moved to Mexborough and then attended Schofield Street Junior School. His parents owned a newsagent's and tobacconist's store. He recalled being captivated by animals, collecting, and creating toy lead creatures in Poetry in Making. When his elder brother gamekeeper fired magpies, owls, rats, and curlews, he acted as a retriever, surrounded by the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and moors. He explored Manor Farm in Old Denaby, which he said he would get to know "better than any place on earth" during his stay in Mexborough. His earliest poems, "The Thought Fox," and "The Rain Horse," were recollections of the area. John Wholly, a close friend at the time, led Hughes to the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough, where the boys spent vast swaths of time. Hughes became close to the family and learned a lot about wildlife from Wholly's father, a gamekeeper. He began seeing fishing as a somewhat religious experience.

Hughes' interest in poetry grew at Mexborough Grammar School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write and grow his poetry. Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot is a form of espionage. Hughes was mentored by his sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry, and John Fisher, another mentor. Harold Massingham, a Poet, was also coached by Fisher and was also mentored by Fisher. In 1946, "Wild West," one of Hughes' earliest poems, was published in the grammar school magazine The Don and Dearne, followed by further poems in 1948. He had no other intention than to be a poet by 16 years old.

During the same year, Hughes won an English open exhibition at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but he decided to first perform his national service. His two years of national service (1949–51) were rather uneventfully. Hughes was stationed in the RAF as a ground wireless mechanic on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire, a time when he had nothing to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow." He learned a number of the plays by heart and memorised symphonies of W. B. Yeats' poetry.

Under M.J.C., Hughes first studied English at Pembroke College in 1951. Hodgart, the balladic authority, is a source of balladic history. Hughes benefited and encouraged by Hodgart's direction, but he attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, being stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary history. "I might say that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, even had a strong penchant for it," he wrote, but this felt to me not only a sadistic game but also a deeply destructive of myself." He moved to Anthropology and Archaeology in his third year, both of which would later influence his poetry. In Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954, he did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class distinction. His first published poetry appeared in Chequer. "The little boys and the seasons," a poem that was written at this time, was released in Granta under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.

Hughes went on to work as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for J. Arthur Rank, a British film company. He worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a position that gave him plenty of opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. Hughes and his companions held a party on February 25, 1956, the first issue of St. Botolph's Review. Hughes had four poems in it. He met American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship at the party. She had already published extensively, received several awards, and wanted to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers, and wanted to meet them first. There was a great communal attraction in London, but they did not meet again for another month as Plath was going through London on her way to Paris. On her return three weeks later, she visited him once more.

Hughes and Plath were married at St George the Martyr, Holborn, on June 16, 1956, four months after they had first met. The date, Bloomsday, was deliberately chosen in honour of James Joyce. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast, and she welcomed them on their honeymoon. Plath did not mention her history of depression and suicide attempts to him until much later, according to Hughes' biographers. Hughes observed later in Birthday Letters that early in their marriage, he could see the chasms of difference between him and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage, they were happy and supported, actively seeking their writing careers.

They lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue on returning to Cambridge. They had all been published in The Nation, Poetry, and The Atlantic in that year. Plath typed up Hughes' manuscript for his collection Hawk in the Rain, which went on to win a poetry competition run by the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. Harper's first prize was published in September 1957, earning Hughes widespread critical acclaim as a result of the book's introduction in September 1957, which culminated in him winning the Somerset Maugham Award. The work favored hard-hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of Middle English – a style he favored over the more affluent latinate sounds.

Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, during this time, and the couple moved to the United States so that Plath could teach at her alma mater, Smith College. Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate several of Hughes' books, including Crow, in 1958, was meeting them in 1958. The couple returned to England, first staying in Heptonstall for a short time and then finding a tiny apartment in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing, with Hughes assisting with BBC programmes as well as publishing essays, articles, surveys, and interviews. He wrote the poems that would be published in Wodwo (1967) and Recklings (1966). Lupercal came out and won the Hawthorn Prize in March 1960. He found himself to be the wild poet of the wild, writing only about animals. With The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s, he began to seriously investigate mythical and esoteric traditions, including shamanism, alchemy, and Buddhism. The imagination of that period, according to him, could resolve dualistic divides in the human psyche and poetry.

Frieda Rebecca (b. ): Hughes and Plath had two children. 1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962-2009) and his mother, Courtney Green, in 1961, purchased the house in North Tawton, Devon. Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill, who had been subletting the Primrose Hill apartment with her husband in 1962. Hughes and Plath were divorced in the fall of 1962 and moved to a new apartment with the children under the cloud of his affair.

Plath letters from 18 February 1960 to 4 February 1963, which were unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically assaulting her months before she miscarried their second child in 1961.

Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963, after being beset by depression triggered by her husband's affair and a tradition of suicide attempts. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, Hughes screamed, "That's the end of my life." The remainder of the story is posthumous." Some people believed that Hughes had compelled Plath to suicide. Some of those who were furious that "Hughes" is written on the stone have repeatedly dismissed Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall, leaving only the word "Sylvia Plath" as the stone was beaten. Plath's poem "The Jailer," in which the speaker condemns her husband's violence, was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, is included in the feminist anthology Sisterhood's Powerful. In the poem "Arraignment," a radical feminist poet, Robin Morgan wrote that she openly accused Hughes of Plath's battery and murder. Morgan's 1972 book Monster, which included the poem, was banned, and underground, pirated editions of it were released. Plath's name was threatened by other radical feminists. A war raged in The Guardian and The Independent's letters pages in 1989, with Hughes under public scrutiny. Hughes wrote the essay "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace" in The Guardian on April 20, 1989: Hughes wrote "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace."

Hughes, Plath's widower, became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). Some commentators were dissatisfied with the book's choice of poem order and omissions, while others said that he had actually compelled her to suicide and therefore was not responsible for her literary legacy. Plath's journal's final volume was destroyed by him, relating their last few months together. He defends his behavior in his foreword to Sylvia Plath's Journals as a matter of concern for the couple's young children.

Following Plath's death, he wrote two poems "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat" and then stopped writing poetry for three years. He lectured extensively, wrote critical essays, and became involved in Poetry International with Patrick Garland and Charles Osborne in the hopes of linking English poetry to the rest of the world. He wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which culminated in the epic story The Life and Songs of the Crow, which is one of Hughes' most famous of the series. Hughes created two sculptures of a jaguar in 1967, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister; Gerald Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was on display in 2012.

Assia Wevill died by suicide on March 23, 1969, six years after Plath's asphyxiation from a gas stove. Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), Hughes' four-year-old daughter who was born on March 3, 1965, was also killed by Wevill. Hughes had been accused of bullying to both Plath and Wevill after their deaths. Before the work Cave Birds was published in 1975, Hughes did not complete the Crow sequence.

Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, in August 1970, and the two stayed together until his death. He bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and kept the property at Court Green. He began raising a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon, named Moortown, a term that was embedded in the name of one of his poetry collections. He later became President of the charitable Farms for City Children, which was founded by Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh by his friend Michael Morpurgo. Crow was first published in October 1970.

Olwyn and his brother, Olwyn, established the Rainbow Press in 1970, which included poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney, which were published in Daedalus Press, Rampant Lions Press, and John Roberts Press.

In December 1984, Hughes was named Poet Laureate after Sir John Betjeman. Before that year, Faber had released What is the Truth?, illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. He received the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award, for his efforts. Hughes wrote several children's books and collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. He devoted himself to the Arvon Foundation, which promotes writing education and runs residential writing courses at Hughes' home in Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire. He made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which featured him reading passages from his 1968 book The Iron Man. He appeared in the 1994 documentary Seven Crows A Secret.

Hughes became alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers close to his Devonshire home in early 1994. This prompted him to become one of the original trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity that was founded to restore rivers through catchment-scale administration and a close partnership with local landowners and riparian owners.

About a year before his death, Hughes was made a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. He continued to live at the Devon house until he died of a fatal heart attack on October 28th, 1998, while receiving hospitalization for colon cancer in Southwark, London. His funeral took place in Exeter on November 3rd, 1998 at North Tawton cathedral, and he was cremated in Exeter. Seamus Heaney, a fellow writer, said at the funeral, "No death outside of my immediate family has left me feeling more confused." No death in my lifetime has harmed poets further. He was a symbol of tenderness and strength, a great archeologist under whose influence the majority of poetry's children could enter and feel safe. His creative abilities were, as Shakespeare said, only increasing. The veil of poetry is rented at his death, and learning is broken," says the poet.

After suffering from depression, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, committed suicide in Alaska on March 16th.

Carol Hughes revealed in January 2013 that she would write a memoir about their marriage. "Hughes' widow breaks silence to defend his name," the Times headlined, adding that "for more than 40 years she has kept her mum," despite the fact that the late Poet Laureate's ferocious debate around him has raged after his first wife, poet Sylvia Plath, has been "serious."

In 2014, Hughes' brother Gerald's memoir was published, but Kirkus Reviews describes it as "a warm recollection of a lauded poet."

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Career

Hughes began studying English at Pembroke College in 1951, according to M.J.C. Hodgart, a balladic figure, is an authority on balladic forms. Hughes was encouraged and aided by Hodgart's leadership, but he attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, remaining unconcerned by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary history. "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, and even had a keen interest in it," he said, but that it was not only a sadistic game but also a deeply destructive of myself." He went to Anthropology and Archaeology in his third year, which would later influence his poetry. In Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954, he did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class distinction. In Chequer, his first published poetry appeared. "The little boys and the seasons" was a poem that was written at this time in Granta under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.

Hughes left university and Cambridge to pursue various careers, including as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a position that afforded him ample opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. Hughes and his colleagues held a party on February 25, 1956 to launch St. Botolph's Review, which was a single issue. Hughes had four poems in it. He met American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the party. She had already published extensively, received several awards, and she had come to visit Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. When Plath was traveling through London on her way to Paris, there was a great communal attraction but they did not meet again for another month. On her return three weeks later, she visited him once more.

Hughes and Plath married in St George the Martyr, Holborn, on June 16, 1956, four months after they had first met. The date, Bloomsday, was deliberately chosen in honor of James Joyce. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest, and she joined them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast. Plath's biographers note that he did not tell her about her depression and suicide attempts before much later. Hughes wrote later in Birthday Letters, saying that early in his marriage, he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage, they were happy and encouraged, eagerly embarking on their writing careers.

They lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue on returning to Cambridge. They had all been published in The Nation, Poetry, and The Atlantic in that year. Plath typed up Hughes' manuscript for his collection Hawk in the Rain, which went on to win a poetry competition hosted by the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. With the book's debut in September 1957, Hughes received widespread critical acclaim, resulting in him winning a Somerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard-hitting trochees and spondees that were reminiscent of Middle English – a style he used throughout his career compared to more gentel latinate sounds.

During this time, the two couples migrated to America in order to ensure Plath could take a teaching position at Smith College, her alma mater; during this period, Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They met Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes' books, including Crow in 1958. The couple returned to England, residing in Heptonstall for a short time before finding a tiny apartment in Primrose Hill, London. Both writers were writing, with Hughes as well as releasing essays, papers, research, and talks. He wrote the poems that would be published in Wodwo (1967) and Recklings (1966). Lupercal came out and claimed the Hawthorn Prize in March 1960. He found himself being branded the poet of the wild by writing mainly about animals. With The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a main subject in the early 1960s, he began to investigate myth and esoteric traditions, including shamanism, alchemy, and Buddhism. That imagination, he said, could resolve dualistic divides in the human psyche and poetry was the target of his study.

Frieda Rebecca (b.) Hughes and Plath had two children. (60) and Nicholas Farrar (1962–2009) and his companion, Court Green, in 1961, purchased the house in North Tawton, Devon. Hughes and Assia Wevill, who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband, began in the summer of 1962. Hughes and Plath married in the fall of 1962 and moved to a new apartment with the children, despite the chaos surrounding his affair.

Plath letters, which were published between 18 February 1960 and January 1963, were unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically assaulting her months before she miscarried their second child in 1961.

Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963, after being plagued by depression exacerbated by her husband's affair and a history of suicide attempts. "That's the end of my life," Hughes wrote in a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College. The rest of the story is posthumous. Some people believed that Hughes had caused Plath to die. Many people who were furious that "Hughes" is written on the stone and tried to chisel it off, left only the word "Sylvia Plath." Plath's poem "The Jailer," in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, was included in the feminist anthology. Robin Morgan, a radical feminist poet, wrote the poem "Arraignment" in which she explicitly accused Hughes of Plath's battery and murder. Morgan's 1972 book Monster, which contained the poem, was banned, and underground, pirated versions of it were published. Plath's name was threatened by other radical feminists. In 1989, as Hughes was under public scrutiny, a conflict erupted in The Guardian and The Independent's letters pages. Hughes wrote "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace" in The Guardian on April 20, 1989: "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace."

Hughes, Plath's widower, became Plath's executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). Some scholars were dissatisfied with the book's selection of poem order and omissions, and some scholars of Hughes claimed that he had effectively drove her to suicide and therefore was not responsible for her literary legacy. Plath's journal's final volume was destroyed by him, chronicling their last few months together. He defends his behavior in his foreword to Sylvia Plath's Journals as a concern for the couple's young children.

Following Plath's death, he wrote two poems titled "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat" and then stopped writing poetry for three years. He lectured widely, wrote critical essays, and became involved in Poetry International with Patrick Garland and Charles Osborne in the hopes of linking English poetry with the rest of the world. In 1966, he wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which culminated in the epic story The Life and Songs of the Crow, which is one of Hughes' most well-known pieces. Hughes made two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister; Gerald Hughes' sculpture, which featured the letter 'A' on its forehead, was available in 1967.

Assia Wevill died by suicide in the same way on March 23, 1969, six years after Plath's asphyxiation from a gas stove. Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), Hughes' four-year-old daughter, was also killed by Wevill, who was born on March 3rd 1965. Hughes was accused of bullying both Plath and Wevill as a result of their deaths. Until the work Cave Birds was published in 1975, Hughes did not complete the Crow sequence.

Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, in August 1970, and the two were together until his death. Lumb Bank, a West Yorkshire family, was purchased by him and he tended the house at Court Green. Moortown, Devon, a small farm that became embedded in the name of one of his poetry collections, was started by him. He later became President of the charities for City Children, founded by his companion Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh. Crow was first published in October 1970.

Olwyn, Banning, Corn Light, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney founded the Rainbow Press in 1970, which published sixteen titles between 1971 and 1981, including poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney, published by Daedalus Press, Rampant Lions Press and the John Roberts Press.

In December 1984, Hughes was named Poet Laureate, after Sir John Betjeman. Early this year, Faber had published What is the Truth?, illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. He received the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award, for his work. Hughes wrote several children's books and performed closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. At Hughes' home in Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire, he dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation, which promotes writing instruction and runs residential writing courses. In 1993, he made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which featured him reading excerpts from his 1968 book The Iron Man. He appeared in the 1994 film Seven Crows A Secret.

Hughes became alarmed by the disappearance of fish in rivers close to his Devonshire home in early 1994. This prompted him to become one of the original trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a nonprofit that aims to restore rivers by catchment-scale administration and a close working relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.

Hughes was named a member of Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II right before he died. He stayed at the Devon house until he died of a deadly heart attack on October 28, 1998, while receiving hospitalized colon cancer in Southwark, London. His funeral was held on November 3rd, 1998, at North Tawton Church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Seamus Heaney, a fellow writer, said, "No death outside of my immediate family has left me feeling more beft." No one in my lifetime has harmed writers more than ever. He was a tower of tenderness and tenacity, a great archeologist under whose rule the majority of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. Shakespeare said that his creative abilities were still soaring. Poetry is rent, and learning's walls are broken by his death.

After being depressed, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, committed suicide in Alaska on March 16th.

Carol Hughes announced in January 2013 that she would write a book about their marriage. The Times headlined "Hughes' widow breaks silence to defend his name" and announced that "for more than four decades she has maintained her silence, never once participating in the tumultuous debate that has raged around the late Poet Laureate since his first wife, poet Sylvia Plath's suicide."

In 2014, a memoir by Hughes' brother Gerald was published, but Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir, which Kirkus Reviews describes as "a warm recollection of a lauded poet."

Source