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This text provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the poetry of Ted Hughes, a major figure in twentieth- century poetry whose work is concerned with the forces of nature and their interaction with the human mind. It is also the first full length study to place Hughes's poetry in the context of significant developments in literary theory that have occured during his life, drawing in particular on the 'French theorists'- Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes. The study sheds new light on Hughes's prosody, and on such matters as Hughes's relation to the 'Movement' poets, the influence of Sylvia Plath, his relation to Romanticism, his interest in myth and shamanism, and the implications of the Laureateship for his work. The poems are presented in chronological order, tracing the development of Hughes's highly distinctive style. The study also discusses Hughes's recently published non-fiction- Winter Pollen (1994) and Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992). The Poetry of Ted Hughes is indispensable for all students and academics interested in contemporary poetry and culture.
Ted Hughes is one of the greatest English poets of this century, yet his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than 30 years. Many people, including his friend Al Alvarez, have held Hughes's adultery responsible for Plath's death. Elaine Feinstein first met Hughes in 1969, and she was a good friend of his and his sister Olwyn's, both of whom guarded the Plath estate. She knows many of the European and America poets who so influenced Hughes - Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Miroslav Holub, and knows the world in which both he and Plath moved.
At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to others. It is a fascinatingly detailed picture of a mind of genius as it evolved through an incomparably eventful life and career.
For the first time, the vast canon of the poetry of Ted Hughes - winner of the Whitbread and Forward Prizes and former Poet Laureate - together in a single e-book. The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the best-selling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems that Hughes felt crossed over into adult poetry. Most significantly it also includes small press publications and editions that, until now, remain uncollected and have never before been available to a general readership. 'A guardian spirit of the land and language.' Seamus Heaney
When Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds and River were first published, the weight of each collection tended to be overlooked in favour of other considerations. This book shows the coherence and poetic strength of each sequence and its relationship to the larger output.
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Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain’s most important poets. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes’s life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.
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