Earth-Moon:
A Ted Hughes Website
Ted Hughes: A Bio-/Bibliographical Sketch
Introductory Note:
The following is a rough sketch attempting to combine key events in Ted Hughes' life and a history of major publications into something that conveys a general idea of where he came from and what was the background to some of his work. It is neither intended as a full biography nor do the works mentioned present a full bibliography. There currently exists no full, reliable biography of Ted Hughes. (A lengthy review of Elaine Feinstein's work was published on this site.)
This present text grew from a draft intended (in slightly different form) for a paper on Ted Hughes many years ago — and a draft it still is. As such it draws heavily on publications and information provided by other authors, most notably Keith Sagar and Ann Skea.
For additional biographical detail, please refer to Ann Skea's Timeline, published on her site at ann.skea.com.
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Mytholmroyd
Edward James Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in 1, Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd [pron. »my-tholm-royd« as in »my«/»mine«], a village in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, England. He was the third child of Edith Farrar and William Henry Hughes.
[View of Mytholmroyd; click for larger image (pop-up)]
Mytholmroyd, where Ted and his older sister and brother, Olwyn and Gerald, grew up, is surrounded by the stark, barren moorscape of the Yorkshire Pennines. For centuries, the area was dominated by the clothmaking industry, and many of its spinning and weaving mills and cottages, mill chimneys and reservoirs can still be seen today. The valley's Rochdale Canal and the railway line also date from the industrial boom-time of this part of England.
[No 1 Aspinall; click for larger image (pop-up)]
Mytholmroyd is located in an area the overall mood of which can change dramatically with the weather. On a rainy day, the village and the valley bottom can be quite dark and depressing — an impression that must have been heightened by the much higher levels of smoke in the 1930s and the blackened walls of most houses. Venturing onto the moors on such a day, you're likely to be met by a blasting wind and rain pelting at you almost horizontally.
On a bright and sunny day, however, the area can be uplifting and exhilarating, with the gentle curves of the moors rolling away in the distance.
[Moors above Mytholmroyd; click for larger image (pop-up)]
From quite early on, Gerald, who was 10 years older than Ted, took his younger brother along on little adventure expeditions, hunting and camping [cf. e.g. »The Rock«]. These outings and Gerald's habit of mythologising their outdoor world as prehistoric or native American, left a strong and lasting impression on him, and one that at times he would be hankering after for the rest of his life.
Mexborough
In 1938 the family moved to Mexborough, a mining town in South Yorkshire, where the parents opened a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. Uprooted, the children thoroughly disliked the new place and Gerald soon left home to become a gamekeeper [cf. Poetry in the Making: 16].
Missing the adventure outings with his brother, Mytholmroyd friends and landscape, Ted searched for exciting places and soon got friendly with a farmer at the end of the village on the opposite bank. Here, he could roam fields and small patches of forest and marsh close by the river. And apparently it was here that he made the striking encounter, coming face to face with a fox, that later became an inspiration for the famous »Thought-Fox«.
[Mexborough: view across Canal to Old Denaby; click for larger image (pop-up)]
Shortly after beginning Grammar school, Ted made friends with a boy two years older than him. John's father was head forester on a nearby estate, and his family lived there in »The Lodge« by the gate. Soon enough, Ted began to regularly retreat there, often staying over for the whole weekend, hunting and fishing, spending his time with his new friends and their family.
[doodles inside the back cover of Hughes' grammar school Bible; click for larger image (pop-up);
Image by kind permission of Emory University Library © Emory University Library ]
It seems that around the same time (age 11), he started writing comic verse, as he claims, for »classroom consumption« [Paris Review, Vol. 37, No. 134, 1995, 59]. His writing was much encouraged by his English teachers at Mexborough Grammar School [cf. e.g. Keith Sagar: Ilkley Exhibition Catalogue, 1975, unpaginated], and in June 1946 one of his early poems (»Wild West«) and the outline of a short story (later developed further in »The Harvesting« in Wodwo) were published in the Grammar school magazine The Don and Dearne, followed by further poems in the July issue of 1948.
During the same year, Hughes won an Open Exhibition in English to Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his National Service first. Finishing school, he was given a copy of Robert Graves's White Goddess, a book that was to have a great influence, particularly on his early writing.
[ The White Goddess by Robert Graves. A gift to Hughes by his English teacher John Fisher...; click for larger image (pop-up);
Image by kind permission of Emory University Library;
© Emory University Library. ]
His two years of National Service (1949—1951) seem to have passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed »as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire — a time of which he mentions that he had ›nothing to do but read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow‹« [Sagar: Ted Hughes, 3]. Next was university.
Cambridge
Hughes entered Cambridge in 1951, full of hope that reading English might help his own writing. However, his hopes were soon diminished as his studies proved rather stifling for his own creativity [cf. e.g. »The Burnt Fox« in Winter Pollen]. As a consequence, he changed to reading archaeology and anthropology in 1953. Nevertheless, it seems he wrote little at the time. In June 1954, the University magazine Granta published his poem »The Little Boys and the Seasons« under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing [Ilkley, unpaginated].
[ Title page of Hughes's copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works ; click for larger image (pop-up);
Image by kind permission of Emory University Library
© Emory University Library. ]
Hughes graduated in June 1954 and, to support himself, worked in several part time jobs. In 1956 some friends of Hughes decided to launch their own poetry magazine, the St. Botolph's Review. At the inauguration party for the Review (25 February) — the first (and only) issue of which carried several of his poems — he met Sylvia Plath, who had come to Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship.
Sylvia Plath | Marriage | USA
Plath and Hughes married on 16 June 1956 and spent their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain.
Later the same year, Sylvia Plath typed up a manuscript of Hughes' and sent it off for a competition for a first book of poems in English, sponsored by the Poetry Centre of the Young Man's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. From 287 entries the judges (W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore) chose The Hawk in the Rain [Ilkley, unpaginated]. The prize was publication by Harper.
[ The Hawk in the Rain,
1976 paperback cover ]
When Sylvia Plath had finished her M.A., the young couple travelled to the US and spent their Summer at Cape Cod. In Autumn 1957 Sylvia took up a teaching appointment at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, while Ted taught one term of Creative Writing and English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. On 18 September The Hawk in the Rain was published.
In 1958 they met sculptor and graphic artist Leonard Baskin, and a fruitful and lifelong creative relationship developed between him and Hughes, resulting in such collaborations as Crow, Cave Birds, Moon-Whales, Season Songs, Under the North Star, A Primer of Birds, Flowers and Insects, Capriccio and Howls and Whispers.
Hughes and Plath moved to a small apartment in Boston and Sylvia Plath decided to give up her academic career and dedicate herself to full-time writing. »Here, in addition to much of Lupercal, Hughes wrote Meet My Folks! and most of the stories, later collected in Wodwo« [Ilkley, unpaginated].
After a camping tour across the United States in the Summer of 1959, the couple spent the Autumn in the artists' colony Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, where Plath finished The Colossus and Hughes Lupercal. At Yaddo, Hughes met Chinese composer Chou Wen-chung who invited him to write a libretto for The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol) [Ekbert Faas: Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, 1980, 25]. Ekbert Faas reports that »their plans never materialized, but Hughes rewrote the entire Bardo Thödol several times [...]« [Faas, 25].
[ Under the North Star – Leonard Baskin cover]
In December Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes returned to England and after a relatively short stay at Heptonstall, Yorkshire, the couple moved into a tiny flat in London.
The 1960s
Shortly after the publication of Ted Hughes' Lupercal (March 1960), Sylvia Plath gave birth to their daughter, Frieda Rebecca. During the year, Plath worked on The Bell Jar, while Hughes rejected much of what worked on at the time. Some of the pieces, which Keith Sagar characterized as »exercises in new styles, not quite brought off« [Ilkley, unpaginated], were later collected in a limited edition as Recklings. In addition to this, and for financial support, Hughes began a series of radio talks in the BBC's Listening and Writing programme, he wrote essays, reviews and articles for newspapers and magazines like The New Statesman and The Listener.
[ Lupercal, 1977 paperback cover ]
On 7 April 1961, Faber & Faber published his first children's book, Meet My Folks!, a light-hearted series of heavily rhyming poems about imaginary relatives. At the end of August the young family moved to Devon where they had bought Court Green, an old parsonage.
On 17 January 1962 their second child, Nicholas Farrar, was born. But the marriage already seems to have been in crisis so that the couple separated. Hughes moved back to London at the end of September while Plath and the children followed two months later. It was during this time that Sylvia Plath wrote what is generally recognised as her most powerful poetry, Ariel.
Sylvia Plath died, taking her own life, in February 1963.
After Sylvia's death, Ted Hughes took the children and eventually moved back to Devon. A lecturer's salary granted to him by the University of Vienna for five years [Paris Review, 62] allowed him to support himself and the children.
[ Trees ]
For several years from 1963 onwards he published next to no new poetry for adults, though writing reviews and criticism for newspapers and magazines. Instead, he seems to have concentrated on writing for children. How the Whale Became, his first collection of fable-like stories for children, and The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, a remarkable collection of poems set on a Moon at »the bottom of our dreams« [Poetry in the Making, 110], were both published in November 1963. Notably, and similar to major themes in his works for adults, Hughes continued to develop the main thematic strands of both books.
In April 1964, Faber & Faber published Nessie the Mannerless Monster, originally a commission for Vogue a few years earlier. In 1965 Hughes worked as a judge in the National Children's Poetry Competition of the Daily Mirror, later the W.H. Smith National Literary Competition. With Daniel Weissbort he co-edited (and contributed to) Modern Poetry in Translation, aiming at the introduction of ›foreign‹ poetic voices into the British literary landscape. Two radio plays for children were broadcast: The Tiger's Bones and Beauty and the Beast, followed, over the next years, by The Coming of the Kings (1967), Sean, the Fool, the Devil and the Cats (1968) and Orpheus (1971).
In 1966, Hughes started writing the first Crow poems. Two limited editions for adults were published: Recklings and The Burning of the Brothel. In May 1967, Faber & Faber published Wodwo, containing poems, five short stories and a play, some of which date back as far as the early sixties. In July the first Crow poem appeared in the Scotsman, and in December, based on his work for the BBC's Listening and Writing programme, Faber published Poetry in the Making. In addition, there was the limited edition Scapegoats and Rabies and he began working with Peter Brook's National Theatre Company on Seneca's Oedipus.
[ The Iron Man –
1980 PB, cover by George Adamson]
In February 1968 The Iron Man was published, followed by the first performance of Seneca's Oedipus in March, and Hughes edited A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse.
1969 saw the print publication of Oedipus. In March, tragic personal events once again overshadowed his life, when his partner Assia Wevill took her life and that of their daughter Shura (born in 1967). Hughes' mother died shortly afterwards, in May.
In complete turmoil, Hughes moved back and forth between Lumb Bank, a house he had bought in Yorkshire, now a property of The Arvon Foundation, and between Ireland and Devon.
1970s
In August 1970, Ted Hughes married Carol Orchard, daughter of a Devon farmer, and finally settled down in Court Green. On 1 September 1970, Faber & Faber published The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays, followed on 12 October by Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, a poetic cycle sparked by a collaboration with Leonard Baskin. During the same year the first »Myth and Education« essay appeared in Children's Literature in Education.
[ Crow – front cover by Barrie Cooke, 1972 vinyl double lp ]
Since the production of Oedipus, Ted Hughes and Peter Brook had continued their collaborative work in which Hughes provided »germs of plots and suggestive dramatic situations« [Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, xi] for rehearsals and for Brooks experiments with different forms of expression on stage. Over the Summer 1971, then, Hughes accompanied Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research for one of their experiments in theatre which would culminate in a performance at the 5th Shiraz-Festival at Persepolis, Iran.
For source material, Brook had returned to Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and related sources while Hughes developed »Orghast«, a new ›language‹ which aimed at communication beyond words, while attempting to short-circuit the actors out of habit and imprisonment by concrete language [cf. A.C.H. Smith: Orghast at Persepolis, 1972].
While in Iran, Hughes worked on several poems later collected in Prometheus on His Crag. He edited his Shakespeare collection: A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse containing a foreword that already hinted at ›Shakespeare's myth‹, which Hughes would later explore more fully in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.
[ Hay nr. Winkleigh, Devon]
Returning from Iran, Hughes retreated further from the public. He bought Moortown farm and, apart from writing, dedicated his time to farm work, breeding sheep and cattle, helped by his father in law, Jack Orchard. In 1972, Faber & Faber published Selected Poems: 1957—1967 and a second (augmented) edition of Crow.
Little is known of Hughes' life during the following years until the mid-eighties. Naturally, he continued writing, exploring new themes and developing older ones that preoccupied him. His major publications between 1973 and 1984 include the following:
- Prometheus on His Crag — a limited edition, 1973; most poems later collected in Moortown 1979; based on the Prometheus theme explored during the experiments with Peter Brook.
- The Tiger's Bones and Other Plays for Children (1974) — the American edition of The Coming of the Kings, including the play »Orpheus«, which was not in the English edition; plays for children.
[ Cave Birds, 1979 – Leonard Baskin cover ]
- Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (1974, limited edition) — a collection of seasonal poems, which went into the enlarged edition of Season Songs (1975) — both publications were based on Five Autumn Songs for Children's Voices (1968).
- Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama (1975; enlarged public edition 1978) — this can be seen as a direct continuation of the themes of Crow and Prometheus on his Crag. Commissioned for performance at the Ilkley Festival and partly based on drawings by Leonard Baskin, Cave Birds presents the ›alchemical‹ purgation (trial, death sentence by bird beings), purification in the underworld, and resurrection/rebirth of a hero who in some sources is described as a »Socratean Cock«. Yet, alchemy is only one of the levels on which the book works.
- Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (1976) — a combination of poems from The Earth-Owl and Other Moon People (1963) with the privately published Earth-Moon (1976).
- The second »Myth and Education« essay (1976) in Geoff Fox, (ed.) Writers, Critics and Children. This essay revolves around the idea that good education must include an education of the imagination as the one human faculty which allows us to embrace both, the ›outer world‹ of man-created technology and culture and the ›inner world‹ of the biological body and spirit. Literature and art, Hughes proposes, can provide such an educational tool.
[ Moon-Whales, 1976 – Leonard Baskin cover ]
- Gaudete (1977) — a long poem originally conceived as a film scenario around 1963. As such it is directly connected to »The Wound« from Wodwo. The story tells of a priest who is abducted by spirits who need his help. While he is in the underworld, a double, made of an oak-log takes his position in the parish — with devastating results. The main body of the book tells the story of the double, while the epilogue contains the poems written by the real priest and found on his return from the underworld.
- Orts, a limited edition from 1978, contained further poems originating from the context of Gaudete's epilogue. Most of them were collected in Moortown.
- Moortown Elegies (limited edition 1978; 1979 trade edition, different from the original; 1989, trade edition of several of the poems as Moortown Diary): excerpts from a verse diary kept over the years after his return from Iran. The title refers to Moortown Farm, where he had worked together with his wife's father, Jack Orchard, who had died in 1976.
[ Gaudete, 1977 – Leonard Baskin cover ]
- Moon-Bells and Other Poems — a collection of poems for children which won the first Signal Poetry Award. Some of these poems later appear in collections for adults.
- Remains of Elmet (1979, limited and public editions; revised edition appeared as Elmet in 1994) — a sequence centring on the area where Hughes spent his early childhood in the Yorkshire Pennines. Collaboration with photographer Fay Godwin.
- Adam and the Sacred Nine and The Threshold published as limited editions in 1979. The former is based on The Conference of the Birds, which was the source for some experiments by Peter Brook's company and one of the base texts for Cave Birds. According to Hughes, it grew out of a writing exercise. The Threshold is a short story, illustrated by Ralph Steadman.
[ Moortown, 1979 – Leonard Baskin cover ]
- Moortown combined poems from the previously published Prometheus on His Crag, Moortown Elegies, Orts, Adam and the Sacred Nine and other limited editions.
The 1980s
In 1980, Keith Sagar organised the first Ted Hughes conference, the contributions to which were collected in The Achievement of Ted Hughes. While the 1980s also saw the publication of many major works for children, Hughes also continued his efforts publishing Sylvia Plath's work often earning nothing but criticism for it. Important publications between 1980 and 1985 include:
- Under the North Star (1981) — a collection of poems centred around the animals that live in the Arctic Circle; a collaboration with Leonard Baskin.
- The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (1981), Hughes is editor.
- Selected Poems: 1957—1981 (1982).
- In 1982 Hughes co-edits The Journals of Sylvia Plath with Frances McCullough, apparently in an attempt to balance the one-sided portrayal of her in Letters Home. But the resulting book only sparked further criticism, accusations and attacks.
- With Seamus Heaney he edits The Rattle Bag, an anthology of poems for children.
[ River, 1983 – with Peter Keen ]
- River (1983) — a collaboration with photographer Peter Keen, closely connected with Hughes' favourite past-time: fishing.
- What Is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young (1984). Another book for children which has its roots in Hughes' support of the Farms for City Children project run by Clare and Michael Morpurgo.
On 19 December 1984, following the decline to take of the offer by Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in succession of the late John Betjeman. Writing the occasional poem to commemorate some royal event, Hughes also used the post to promote one of his most urgent concerns: protection of our natural environment. His life withdrawn from the public continued through the eighties more or less until the publication of Birthday Letters, shortly before his death.
Major Publications between 1985 and 1995 include:
[ Ffangs, 1986 – Chris Riddell cover ]
- Collected Poems for Children 1961—1983 (1985).
- Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, 1986, a fascinating children's story that , sadly, remained a fragment; Ffangs tells the story of a little vampire who wants to be human.
- Flowers and Insects, 1986, collects closely observed ›nature‹ poetry.
- The Cat and the Cuckoo (limited edition, 1987, most poems later collected in The Iron Wolf). A book focussing on farm animals and animals who live in the British countryside. Based on his support of Farms for City Children.
- Tales of the Early World (1988) is his continuation of the Creation Tales begun in How the Whale Became.
- Moon-Whales (1988) is a revised edition of the book from 1976 with a completely new set of illustrations by Chris Riddell.
- Moortown Diary (1989) republishes poems from Moortown Elegies, and
Wolfwatching (1989) collects some of the poems from the limited edition A Primer of Birds, as well as previously unpublished poems.
[ Moon-Whales, 1988 – Chris Riddell cover ]
- Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992, revised edition 1993). Hughes' fascination with Shakespeare's work gave rise to the conception of a »basic structural pattern, a fundamental dramatic idea« [Shakespeare and Goddess, xi] underlying Shakespeare's mature plays.
- Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems (1992).
- The Iron Woman (1993), a sequel to his famous The Iron Man with a strong environmental theme.
- The Mermaid's Purse (1993, limited edition; most poems later collected in The Iron Wolf). A sequence of poems about the sea, illustrated by Reg Lloyd. Based on his support of Farms for City Children.
- Three Books (1993) collects poems from Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River in an edition without illustrations or photographs. The idea seems to have been sparked off by Ann Skea and her book Ted Hughes. The Poetic Quest. Faber & Faber published
- A Dancer to God: Tributes to T.S. Eliot (1993) — Three essays commemorating Eliot who was Hughes' early editor at Faber & Faber.
[ Elmet, 1994 – with Fay Godwin ]
- Elmet (1994) — revised edition of Remains of Elmet in which Hughes and Godwin seem to have concentrated on a more balanced presentation of poems and photographs. In addition, the focus has shifted away from the ›remains‹, the loss, to a more uplifting perspective.
- Winter Pollen. Occasional Prose (1994), edited by William Scammell, is a collection of essays, reviews and a short story. During the same year, Hughes contributed four passages to After Ovid, edited by Michael Hoffmann and James Lasdun.
- Ted Hughes edited A Choice of Coleridge's Verse, in which he pointed to a similar mythic pattern as the one he discovered in the works of Shakespeare.
[ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1992 – Andrew Davidson cover ]
- The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (1995) — the third volume of Creation Tales.
Collected Animal Poems (1995), four volumes, made up of two volumes for children (The Iron Wolf and What is the Truth?) and two for adults (The Thought-Fox and A March Calf).
Difficulties of a Bridegroom (1995), a collection of short stories, most of which had previously appeared in Wodwo.
New Selected Poems: 1957—1994.
The 1990s
Over the last few years of his life, Hughes had turned away from essay writing that had preoccupied him for much of the early nineties. He seems to have taken a deliberate move back to translation and theatre, an attempt to break free from writing prose and original verse — a re-orientation. Spring Awakening — a translation of Frank Wedekind's Frühlingserwachen — was published in 1995, soon followed by a translation of Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, staged in London in the autumn of 1996.
[ Collected Animal Poems 1995 – Cover. Ill.: Lisa Flather ]
It is odd to see that in hindsight, by the mid-ninetees it seems as if Hughes was trying to put his house in order, establishing a canon of what he considered his best work, selling manuscripts and correspondence to a university, issuing tape recordings, returning to long-abandoned projects.
In Spring 1997, the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University (Atlanta, USA) acquired an archive including drafts of poems from each of Hughes' published collections as well as literary correspondence, photographs and related materials (shipping weight 5,000 pounds).
Sparked by his contribution to the collection After Ovid, Hughes translated several passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses — a book that seems to have preoccupied him on and off throughout his whole career. These were published in 1997 as Tales from Ovid, for which Hughes won the Whitbread Award. In 1997 Faber published several cassette tape recordings, mainly of his works for children, as well as Shaggy and Spotty, a picture book illustrated by David Lucas.
[ Tales from Ovid, 1997 ]
Moreover, there was a new audio cassette version of Crow, in which Hughes included parts of the previously unpublished link narrative while returning the poem »Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days« to its original context in the Crow narrative. With Seamus Heaney, he collaborated on the edition of The School Bag — a remarkable companion volume to The Rattle Bag.
Early in 1998 followed the publication of Birthday Letters, for which in early October he received the Forward Prize. In the Summer Ted Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit.
On October 28 1998, Ted Hughes died of cancer at the age of 68.
[ Birthday Letters, 1998 – cover from a painting by Frieda Hughes ]
Among the awards Hughes received over the years were:
- the New York Poetry Center First Publication Award (1957),
- the Guinness Poetry Award (1958),
- the Somerset Maugham Award (1960),
- the Hawthornden Prize (1961),
- the City of Florence International Poetry Prize (1969),
- the Premio Internazionale Taormina (1973),
- The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (1974),
- the Signal Poetry Award (1979 for Moon-bells and Other Poems, 1983 for The Rattle Bag, co-edited with Seamus Heaney, 1985 for What is the Truth?),
- the Guardian Children's Fiction Award for What is the Truth? (1984),
- the Heineman Bequest of the Royal Society (1980),
- the Guardian Children's Fiction Award (1985),
- the Kurt Marschler Award (1985),
- the Whitbread Award for 1997 and 1998
- and the 1998 Forward Prize.