Authors :

Ted Hughes [828 HUG]

There is no Collected Poems, and there are various selections, of which the one to use is New Selected Poems 1956-94, 1994. The individual volumes are as follows (important ones starred):

*The Hawk in the Rain, 1957; *Lupercal, 1960; *Wodwo, 1967 (includes some prose fiction); *Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, 1970, enlarged 1972; *Cave Birds, 1975 (illustrations by Leonard Baskin); *Season Songs, 1975, rev. 1976 (primarily for children); *Gaudete, 1977; *Moortown, 1979 (Moortown Diary, 1989, revises the first part of Moortown and adds notes); *Remains of Elmet, with photographs by Fay Godwin, 1979, revised as Elmet, 1994; Under the North Star, 1981 (for children, illustrations by Leonard Baskin); *River, 1983 (with beautiful colour photographs); Flowers and Insects, 1986; Wolfwatching, 1989; Rain-Charm for the Duchy and other Laureate Poems, 1992. Three Books, 1993, contains revised versions of Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River, but with no illustrations. Animal Poems, 4 vols., 1995, is a selection of poems intended for children but contains many intended for adults. Hughes's poetry for children is another matter - there is, of course, also prose - but is not listed here, though it is well worth looking at. *Tales from Ovid, 1997, consists of Hughesian remodelings of Ovid; *Birthday Letters, 1998, is concerned with his life with Sylvia Plath, confessional to a limited extent.

Ted Hughes translated and adapted Seneca's Oedipus, 1969, performed with success at the National Theatre. He has had a special interest in the recent poetry of Eastern Europe; see the poems of Vasko Popa [there are translations in Univ.Lib. and we have his folk-anthology The Golden Apple] and Janos Pilinszky (whose Selected Poems, 1976, and The Desert of Love, 1989, [both in Univ.Lib.] he translated with Janos Csokits). His Choice of Shakespeare's Verse, 1971, has a long Lawrentian introduction, reprinted in Winter Pollen (see below). The Choice was revised in 1991 [824 M].

Poetry in the Making, 1967, brings together writings on poetry for schools (Hughes has done a lot of work for education, especially through the Arvon Foundation, which is his creation). Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1991 [824 D HUG], reflects the influence on Hughes of Robert Graves, The White Goddess, 1947 [301.53 GRA], a book still revered by many poets, for example Peter Redgrove, with whom Hughes's work may be fruitfully compared. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammel, 1994, collects the miscellaneous prose, including some personal reminiscence and telling brief notes on an unexpectedly wide range of poets.

Classmarks for Royal Holloway library are given in square brackets. To check our holdings of these books, and to reserve items on short loan, log into ALEPH here.

See:

  • Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes, 1975, enlarged 1978 [828 HUG/S]. Good bibliography, some biographical information, a thorough but uncritical exposition of the poems.
  • -, ed., The Achievement of Ted Hughes, 1983 [828 HUG/A]. With an important section of 'uncollected and unpublished poems', some of which now appear in the New Selected Poems 1956-94.
  • Gifford, Terry, and Roberts, Neil, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study, 1981 [Univ.Lib.]. A rather more alert critical method than Sagar's. Helpful bibliography.
  • Craig Robinson, Ted Hughes: Shepherd of Being, 1989.
  • Thomas West, Ted Hughes, 1985
  • Seamus Heaney, 'Now and in England', Preoccupations, 1980 {828 HEA]. An important essay dealing with Larkin and Hill as well as Hughes. Heaney and Hughes collaborated in the editing of two anthologies: The Rattle Bag (1985) and The School Bag (1997).
  • Martin Dodsworth, 'Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill: An Antithesis', The New Pelican Guide to English Literature Vol.8, The Present, ed. Boris Ford, 1983 [820.9 PEL]. A rather negative account of Hughes.
  • Helen Vendler, 'Ted Hughes', The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
  • Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation-State, 1992 [809.1932 PAU]. A hostile account of Hughes. Is it more than rhetoric?

Follow this link to the Ted Hughes pages at Leipzig University, which contain a wealth of information, bibliographic materials, reviews and articles relating to Hughes.

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