Ted Hughes’s first collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957; his last, Birthday Letters, in 1998, the year he died. John Bayley, writing in the LRB, described his long poem Gaudete (1977) as ‘one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry’.
Little One Too Many – Born at the bottom of the heap. The baby daughter’s doll. She trailed after the others, lugging him.
Little One Too Many grew up With a strangely wrinkled brow – fold on fold Like the Tragic Mask. Cary Grant was his living double.
They said: when he was little he’d drop And kick and writhe, and kick and cry: ‘I’ll break my leg,...
Night after night he’d sat there, Eighty-four, still telling the tale. With his huge thirst for anaesthetics. ‘Time I were dead,’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’
That’s altered. We lean to a cliff rail Founded in tremblings. Beneath us, two thousand five hundred Miles...
I’d bought a bit of wild ground. In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned. A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently.
It was a gilding of the Deeds – treasure trove! Daffodils just came. And they kept on coming –
‘Blown foam,’ I wrote. ‘Vessels of light!’ They ran under every gust On the earth-surge, ‘their six-bladed screws Churning...
The Gulkana – where it meets the Copper – Swung out of the black spruce forest, on a pebbly bend, And disappeared into it, Hazed with forest fires that had burned for weeks.
Strange word: ‘Gulkana’. What did it mean? A pre-Columbian glyph. A pale, blue line, scrawled with a childish hand Through our crumpled map. It was water More than water, rocks that were more than...
Slips from the eye-corner – overtaking Your first thought.
Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth The sun’s cooled carbon wing Whets the eyebeam.
Those eyes in their helmet Still wired direct To the nuclear core – they alone
Laser the lark-shaped hole In the lark’s song.
We find the earth-tied spurs, among soft ashes. And maybe we find him
Materialised by...
Alice Oswald talks about the poetry of Ted Hughes, with help from recordings of his readings at New York's 92nd Street Y
Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about...
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...
Captain Hook, ‘cadaverous and blackavised’, ‘never more sinister than when he is most polite’, lives in fear of the crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock....
He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to...
The worst of being dubbed Laureate today would not be the task of composing poems for royal and public occasions, but trying to make them sound like oneself, or even more so. Auden had no...
There is a particular type of literary criticism – these days very rare – that aims to exist intensely as bravura performance, dramatic spectacle. It would be pointless to object that...
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
‘When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what...
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...
Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do,...
The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...
Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a...
Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each...
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