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“... Unfinished Mystery Enter Hamlet, stabbed, no longer baffled, Stepping across his mother, drowned in a pearl, Carrying lifeless Ophelia. Now enter Stabbed Othello, enlightened at last, From his cistern of toad-genderings, bearing Suffocated Desdemona. Now enter Headless Macbeth, regicide killed in him, Stepping from the cauldron of sisters Bearing his cold Queen ...”

“... How it hung In the electrical loom Of the Himalayas – I remember The spectre of the rose. All day the flag on the military camp flowed South. In The Shah’s Motel The Manageress – a thunder head Atossa – wept on her bed Or struck awe. Tragic Persian Quaked her bosoms – precarious balloons of water. But still nothing worked. Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust ...”

“... Walt 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 of swung worldweight Hit England’s western wall With a meaningless bump ...”

“... 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 rocks ...”

“... for Jack Brown I Sitting Bull On Christmas Morning Who put this pit-head wheel, Smashed but carefully folded In some sooty fields, into his stocking? And this lifetime nightshift – a snarl Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened, His helmet. And the actual sun closed Into what looks like a bible of coal That falls to bits as he lifts it ...”

“... difficulty as well. A prefatory Author’s Note acknowledges ‘a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes, literary agent to the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Ms Hughes’s contributions to the text have made it almost a work of dual authorship.’ The proof copy I was originally sent phrases it rather differently: ‘This ...”

“... but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm’s study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no dinner party from Hampstead to the Hamptons was ...”

“... been a callous decision, I recall thinking at the time, not to have chosen him. The appointment of Ted Hughes in 1984 was rather different. For one thing, he took over from cuddly John Betjeman, a poet who – with all his charm – was not too strong on Laureate-style gravitas. With Betjeman, we felt and hoped, there was always the possibility of ...”

“... of my father, who hasn’t read aloud since his ‘event’. Darkness falls outside. Inside too. Ted Hughes is in the small audience, and afterwards asks my father whether he ever, like an Inuit, dreamed of his own defeat and death. My father, who’s heard some questions, but never anything like this, doesn’t know ...”

“... of ‘pax’ is somehow unassimilated, crackling angrily in a void of its own making. Like Ted Hughes, another poet much possessed by ‘violence’, Logue also writes children’s books, though neither poet seems often to enter that uncompromising world where children’s cruelty is for real. Both poets are ostensibly harsh and unevasive in ...”

“... what they know of Plath, they almost invariably reply that she killed herself and was married to Ted Hughes. Occasionally they run these two snippets together as if the second were, in some mysterious and not wholly formulated way, related to the first; as if together they add up to something that leaves nothing more to be said. I watch this story shut ...”

“... down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the dastardly Hook. Ted Hughes makes use of the story in his poem ‘Tick Tock Tick Tock’, from Remains of Elmet (1979), though with two important differences: the timepiece is now alarmed, and it’s Peter who’s in danger. Somebody else acted Peter Pan. I swallowed an ...”

“... should be continuous in its concerns with her most ambitiously prophetic narrative. To place Ted Hughes among the Narrative Poets may seem merely paradoxical. Yet, compared with his creative peers – Larkin, Heaney, or the greatest ‘maker’ of his generation Geoffrey Hill, with his confessedly ‘deficient sense of the anecdotal’ – that is ...”

“... So much​ in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to feel confident that his actions and beliefs and literary achievement can be judiciously and authoritatively assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more than seventy items, while the various Hughes archives contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material ...”