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“... 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 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air ...”

“... apprenticeship in any case, there was every reason for the careerists (who included A. Alvarez and Ted Hughes, along with Daniel Weissbort) to look for, and claim to find, a short cut. Philip Larkin’s art, not to speak of Basil Bunting’s or Norman MacCaig’s, was too intricate for them to master. There must be a simpler way! And, brilliantly, they ...”

“... For me the crown is the symbol of the unity of the tribe.’ Ted Hughes St nissan mishan biskit bingo hut an skwidbone strand win me sunday fraym fotograf av momma kween. But me not want dis woolworting no lang no mor. Giv to Iron Man. He coom up dis rainrain day fram gravul pit pleec frogmen liv – wit mistultoes astrologee an beeds av glass dis kweenwite fotograf he giv to Iron Gull ...”

“... dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ...”

“... our culture’, the ‘Marilyn Monroe of the literati’. But the double story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is material for an Emily Brontë or a Henry James, a great ghost story with the roles of haunter and haunted, villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches ...”

“... until he bethinks him of what may be called a thermal poetics: ‘seems to me better (than Ted Hughes) – warmer ... ’ Easily placated though he is, Ted Hughes will hardly be pleased to think that grounds for comparison could be found, even from the oblique standpoint of Edinburgh. A more obvious ...”

“... jest about Benidorm becoming a vast concentration camp for the unemployed makes a pallid foil for Ted Hughes at his most flesh-eating. Hughes’s narrator is a hunter, tracking an undreamt-of assemblage of beasts natural and ominous. He has a brother, ‘criminal to the bone’ and possessed of unnatural teeth, who is ...”

“... for Ted Hughes Years and years ago, these sounds took sides: On the left bank a green silk tapered cast Went whispering through the air, saying hush And lush, entirely free, no matter whether It swished above the hayfield or the river. On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake, A sharp ratcheting kept on and on Cutting across the stillness as another Fisherman gathered line-lengths off his reel ...”

“... 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 Innuit, dreamed of his own defeat and death. My father, who’s heard some questions, but never anything like this, doesn’t know ...”

“... 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 other but seem aspects of the same display. The first poem in this collection, ‘Rain’, seems to give the essence of what actually happens when rain falls and falls on a bare modern English farming countryside ...”

“... had struck a loudly answering chord from the settled centre! That is the predicament of Larkin, of Hughes, of Heaney: each of them initially supposing himself a marginal person speaking up for marginal people, yet forced to recognise – as the royalty statements convey their gratifying yet unnerving message – that the stance he had thought of as special was ...”

“... is work that would be missed if there were no one, and no place, to do it. Little magazines helped Ted Hughes, who is now a welcome Poet Laureate. Poets Laureate pre-date the world of Public Lending Right; they are a survival from a remote past, where poetry was publicity in a sense which has largely disappeared; those were the days when poets hyped, and ...”

“... though, face all ways. And it could still be your best girl referred to, or the Virgin Mary. Ted Hughes wrote a poem for the same place on the same occasion, incised in stone, in the square with Larkin’s. The poem does not feature in this handsome slim collection, at least I don’t think it does, for Hughes was ...”

“... succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and Anthony Powell, aka ‘the horse-face dwarf’. There is even a ‘Hi, Ian’: he calls me ‘the Kerensky of poetry’. Not too bad, I thought at ...”