Ted Hughes: Poet of Myth, Nature... and a Curse

Ted Hughes has been making the rounds of late: This time Dwight Garner of The New York Times takes a look at the newly published Hughes biography written by Oxford professor Jonathan Bate, which we made mention of earlier here. From NYT:

Ted Hughes was an elemental poet of myth and nature, his verse easy to parody. In the late 1960s, the British satirical magazine Private Eye mimicked his work in a manner that Jonathan Bate, in his new biography of Hughes, describes this way: “crow, blood, mud, death, short line, break, no verb.”

Hughes (1930-1998) was elemental in other ways. Hulking, Heathcliff-like, he had large ink-stained hands and a face “like an Easter Island statue,” as one of his lovers put it. A lock of hair consistently flopped over one eye.

His effect on women was incalculable. When Sylvia Plath, his future wife, met him at a party in 1956, she wrote in her diary about “that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me.” His lover Assia Wevill said of him: “He is one of God’s best creatures. Ever. Ever.”

This poet’s pheromonal impact was such, Mr. Bate writes in “Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life,” that one woman who met Hughes at a party “was so viscerally attracted to him that all she could do was go to the ladies’ room and vomit.”

Extreme good looks, always, are blessing and curse. This biography contends that Hughes’s life was cursed in multiple, overlapping ways. He surely brought some of the maledictions on himself.

As we know from earlier biographies of him (and from biographies of Plath, and from dual biographies), his life was rich with incident and tragedy, so much so that a writer would have to be a fool to utterly botch this story.

Mr. Bate is no fool. A professor of English literature at Oxford and the author of many books, including “The Soul of the Age” (2009), a well-regarded intellectual history of Shakespeare, he has delivered an incisive, humane and deeply absorbing account of Hughes’s life and work.

One of this book’s claims on our attention is that Mr. Bate is the first biographer to have had access to thousands of pages of Hughes’s unpublished writing, including journals, at the British Library. We are made to salivate at prose and poems that still may emerge, including Hughes’s long correspondence with a friend, the poet Seamus Heaney.
[...]

Learn more at The New York Times.