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“... and the violent progenies of these copulations look like a cross between Beowulf and Ted Hughes. To read the play is dull enough: what it would be like to have to hear it in the National Theatre, waiting for the next alliterative noun-compound to make its inevitable thud-thud, God only knows. US Martial has a clever punning title, but these ...”

“... fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ambitions,’ she writes in her introduction. Curtis had no ...”

“... read books by women from their own culture. ‘Why should Wordsworth, Whitman, T.S. Eliot or Ted Hughes mean anything special to we people of the Caribbean?’ Evaristo also dramatises forms of differential treatment within communities, examining the ways her black characters see one another. Watching Amma’s play, Carole is conscious that she ...”

“... to serve an idea, I found them all rewarding. The Introduction series must go back a long way: Ted Hughes appeared in the first, and Francis Hope and Tom Stoppard in the second. On the other hand, of the 47 writers who have now appeared, only a very few have become names one recognises. Clearly persistence and luck need to go along with talent. A name ...”

“... Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased self-knowledge’. I am timid about disagreeing with such powerful recommenders, but I ...”

“... may be drawing closet to our Irish omphaloskepsis. In a fine essay on the work of Philip Larkin. Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. Heaney notes that they now seem to feel that the England they once knew is disappearing, and this has ‘driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins’. ‘All three,’ he writes.are ...”

“... exaggerated. Despite the photographs and the smattering of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more ...”

“... lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world.’ Ted Hughes, as quoted by Emma Tennant, weighs in on ‘Nappies’: ‘“I can’t change nappies,” Ted said. It was clear that this wasn’t a failure of skills which he regretted; he was saying he can’t and ...”

“... did not at first seem to offer much of a challenge to anything, or anyone – he was too like Ted Hughes, minus the Lawrentian, black-magical ingredients, and he was a shade too youthfully delighted with the plopping, slopping, thwacking sounds of spade on soil, or milk in pail, etc. (Donnish critics have always loved this onomatopoeic side of ...”

“... figured as the creator of mankind, a tradition followed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, rendered by Ted Hughes as follows: Then Prometheus Gathered that fiery dust and slaked it With the pure spring water, And rolled it under his hands, Pounded it, thumped it, moulded it Into a body shaped like that of a god. Though all the beasts Hang their heads from ...”

“... an archetype. Miller was damned to fame, an angel fallen to earth with his notebooks blazing. Like Ted Hughes, he came into his literary inheritance seeking to make something as solid and permanent as the ancients, but that ambition would forever be inflected by the Greek drama of his own life. Long before there was Marilyn, though, there was that other ...”

“... coherent and tractable. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category. It is rich ...”

“... that the identity of the arch-Thatcherite is unmasked, ‘a Thatcherite before Thatcher’. Ted Hughes, none other. The argument for this judgment does not enforce conviction: ‘His reaction against the civil decencies of Movement verse and identification with what he elsewhere terms “the iron blood of Calvin” make him a Thatcherite before ...”

“... works of Richard Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the objects of his contempt. The Princess Elizabeth embodied all he hoped for. In his ...”

“... and Milosz – poets of the Sixties and Seventies, rest within the lyric’s privilege? Does Ted Hughes, or James Merrill? Does Geoffrey Hill, in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy? Does Donald Davie? As critic, Davie is ‘chiefly arguing’ for this: ‘that Milosz, like a few other ambitious poets of his time, refuses to be restricted ...”