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“... words was the same thing as displaying the qualities, had gone on to urge us to buy his book on Ted Hughes, which he declared to be ‘far more important’ than his book on Lawrence. Since his biography of Lawrence* had struck me as being of value chiefly for its photographs and hardly at all for its scissors-and-pasty text, this seemed to be rather ...”

“... disgust. Similarly, Burnside’s awareness of primal violence lacks the melodramatic insistence of Ted Hughes. Violence, and the resistance to it, are important themes in Ben Okri’s An African Elegy: but his declamatory mode largely proscribes subtle registrations like those of Burnside. Okri’s greatest public exposure as a poet came on the 1991 ...”

“... about a dozen times in his life – ever did any ‘Casting and Gathering’, it wasn’t with Ted Hughes, to whom the poem thus entitled is dedicated, but here, in the play of question and answer with O’Driscoll, who died in 2012, predeceasing his great mentor.‘I, or my books.’ For the duration of this brief, as it were twilit interval, Heaney ...”

“... my English master, twenty-five years ago, asking our class provokingly, ‘But what happens when Ted Hughes runs out of animals?’, and even among devoted Rothites there has been a tendency over the last couple of novels to greet Nathan’s regular reappearance with a mild resignation bordering on surliness. But he’s still there, abuzz with his old ...”

“... museums, and sponsored domestic opera and ballet companies, as well as theatre groups in Europe. Ted Hughes and Peter Brook wrote an experimental play, Orghast at Persepolis, merging the myth of Prometheus with Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was staged at Persepolis as part of the Shiraz Arts Festival. Subsidised in part by the Iranian ...”

“... Ormond Street Children’s Hospital rather than to the publishers, booksellers, or even the poets. Ted Hughes says, ‘Here is an opportunity to buy a book of poems with a good conscience,’ so if buying poetry usually leaves you racked with guilt, now’s your chance. Contributors include many of the best-known contemporary British poets. Maybe the ...”

“... and evil, life and death, extinction and survival. In his introduction to the Collected Poems, Ted Hughes compares them to psalms. They celebrate the figure of the lame wolf, but also pray to it to reveal the secret of changing a stone into a cloud, the cloud into a deer with golden antlers, the deer into the white flower of a basil plant and so ...”

“... of sights set lower and horizons diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew ...”

“... Northern Irish history was not only schooled by P.V. Glob’s book, The Bog People (1969), but by Ted Hughes, who, in ‘Pike’, looked into a pond and saw ‘Stilled legendary depth: / It was as deep as England.’ Yet Heaney has made great poetry about the bog landscape when he has not strained for augmentation, but has simply concentrated on its ...”

“... especially a biography of someone who is now a canonised figure, ‘the father of us all’, as Ted Hughes rather ambiguously remarked – has to make a case for itself; and there is a degree of special pleading in Wilson’s attempt to persuade us of the need (‘the urgent need’) for a new Life. ‘Myths’, she says, need to be dispelled, and new ...”

“... Benjamin Britten. As time and death thinned the old guard she made new friendships, notably with Ted Hughes, arranging to split the laureate’s traditional allowance of sherry with him. Amid the fun there was an inevitably growing number of letters of condolence or commiseration with illness or misfortune, written with impressive particularity and ...”

“... but broke down again and failed to get a degree. Student friends, who included Philip Hobsbaum and Ted Hughes, registered that Redgrove was impressively unusual. Hobsbaum thought he bore ‘a resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, only better dressed’. Harry Guest recalls him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde escaped from Dr ...”

“... and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto ...”

“... forward to crucial developments in our own century – not only to artists like Mann, Eliot or Ted Hughes, but to psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This hardly looks like evidence for Lucy Beckett’s claim that Wagner is a ‘naive artist’ who ‘gives us myth straight’: on the contrary, it provides further support for Syberberg’s ...”

“... poem unfamiliar. There is no place today where his poetry obviously lives, as there is, say, a Ted Hughes county and a Seamus Heaney land, a place domesticated by poets. Keats said that Hampstead had been ‘damned’ by Leigh Hunt, and the Lakes by Wordsworth. For Larkin elsewhere can only be completely authentic (‘a real girl in a real ...”