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“... central vision. Not that all his writing is of equal power. There is a useful parallel here with Ted Hughes, another poet whose work is, in effect, a remaking of our cosmology. Because both poets write from a strong central vision, nothing that they write is negligible, but both are prone to repetition, and to system-building – the mechanical ...”

“... mine offences,’ the choir sang, doing Psalm 39, ‘and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.’ Ted Hughes read the bit from Ecclesiasticus about now praising famous men. Where these orders of service used to be religious brochures offering blasts of Christian devotion, they are now ‘celebrations’ of the life, posthumous animations of the ...”

“... passages in Dart which, if not quite ‘inspoken’, are breath-taking. To draw one comparison: Ted Hughes, the poet from whom Oswald has learned the most, writes a river as ‘a god,/knee-deep among reeds, watching men,/or hung by the heels down the door of a dam’; inviolable and dangerous, distant and indifferent. This is how Oswald writes a ...”

“... Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ways a more sympathetic and engaging presence. But it’s true that a good many of his ...”

“... Few contemporary poems attain the ideal completeness symbolised in ‘The Painter and the Fish’. Ted Hughes, well capable of it, has long rejected certain formal and social co-ordinates which his poetry now sorely misses.† Perhaps difficulties begin at the point where archetypes cannot do the whole work of psychology, where dying animals cannot ...”

“... Far from being a lounge lizard, he is a renowned Stoic. Shall I forget the evening with Ted Hughes where Ben, confined to a wheelchair by a cruel sclerosis, listened to the poet describing a faith healer he knew? The rest of us sat congealed with awkwardness as Hughes told of crooked spines made ...”

“... stand-up comedy and surrealism’. But these, relatively, are slight talents. McMillan’s poem ‘Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley’ is a fantasy in which Hughes, writing a poem, becomes a reincarnated Presley and starts singing to the foxes. It ends with a reference to Hughes’s poem ...”

“... Noting, to quote from Dame Helen’s report on its proceedings, that ‘with the exception of Ted Hughes ... post-war English poetry has not been exciting,’ it discovered also that ‘the American poets of the post-war period were much more experimental and adventurous than the English; but neither the Beat Poets of San Francisco, nor the Black ...”

“... Hill’s acerbic satire on contemporary Britain was most unlike the arch public lyrics that Ted Hughes has published since his elevation to that role. The Sunday Correspondent finally folded just over two weeks later. There was, as far as I know, no causal connection between the two events, but the circumstance has a certain ironic appropriateness ...”

“... culture’), yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W.H. Auden. Asked to nominate his Book of the Century last year, he plumped for Waiting for Godot. The idea of Armitage in Beckettian exile, refusing to grant media interviews, is about as plausible as ‘Chaucer at his laptop,/auto-checking ...”

“... intro I gave Seamus in Delphi, and one forty years back from the Festival Hall, a reading with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and me, Tony Harrison, sadly the only one still alive. Both those I’ve read with have been in this kitchen. Along with the makars I’ve already mentioned, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, Egil, Byron, Seferis, Kazantzakis, ...”

“... the critics who think the poem is a straightforward confession of her desire to avenge herself on Ted Hughes. ‘Why she should have bothered to write poems if this was what she wanted to say is of course not explained,’ Forrest-Thomson remarks tartly. ‘It is taken to be enough that she was a poet.’ What Plath is really doing, she explains, is ...”

“... transposition of the medieval quest, in which a gunslinger goes in search of the elusive Howard Hughes (‘They say he moved to Vegas/or bought Vegas and/moved it./I can’t remember which’), accompanied by a narrating ‘I’ and a talking horse who paraphrases Heidegger. To find Dorn, the Black Mountaineer and poet of the American Dream ...”

“... of polemical biography: it is good to have the relationship between the two poets, Plath and Hughes, treated mainly in literary terms. Yet the account of Plath’s poetry, especially that written in 1962 and 1963 when she had separated from Hughes, is thin, and relies heavily on descriptive paraphrase. Plath made the ...”

“... late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live for letters.’ Letters never seem ...”