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Search - Letters of Ted Hughes

Letters of Ted Hughes
Author: Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes described letter-writing as “excellent training for conversation with the world.” These nearly 300 letters—selected from several thousand—show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud Englishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. — There are le... more »tters dealing with Hughes’s work on classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to the late, revelatory Birthday Letters. There are letters discussing, with notable frankness, his marriages to Sylvia Plath and then to Assia Wevill. After marrying Carol Orchard, in 1970, Hughes ran a farm in Dorset for several years, and there are letters touching on his interest in

astrology, his strong and original views of Shakespeare, and his passion for farming, fishing, and the environment in general. Letters to Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin situate Hughes among his peers as never before.

Letters of Ted Hughes reveals the author as a prose writer of great vigor and subtlety. It deepens our understanding of—and our admiration for—this great twentieth-century poet. "Undoubtedly it is his letters to and about Sylvia Plath that will hold the widest interest; they also contain some of his most directly expressive writing. Before getting to them, though, there are some splendid perceptions among the mass of explicating."—Richard Eder, The New York Times

"There are two ways to talk about the new Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet viewed by some critics as one of the major writers of the 20th century. The second way is to discuss, well, 'It.' 'It,' of course, is what Hughes called 'the Fantasia,' the swirling, decades-long hoo-ha brought about by his relationship with Sylvia Plath: their brief, difficult marriage; their separation due to Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill; and Plath’s suicide shortly thereafter. 'It' ultimately involved a series of bitter clashes over Plath’s legacy, the occasional illicit removal of the surname 'Hughes' from her tombstone (by aggrieved Bell Jar fans), a series of disputed biographies, at least one lawsuit, endless critical appraisals, reappraisals and re-reappraisals, a lame song by Ryan Adams ('I wish I had a Sylvia Plath,' Adams croons, apparently unaware that they don’t come in six-packs) and the inevitable film featuring Gwyneth Paltrow flopping around with Daniel Craig. 'It' is a big deal . . . Hughes is a good letter writer, which is to say his letters are immediately interesting and accessible to third parties to whom they aren’t addressed . . . Hughes can turn out a memorable description (biographies of Plath are 'a perpetual smoldering in the cellar for us. There’s always one or two smoking away'), and his offhand observations about poetry can be startlingly perceptive ('Surrealism . . . is basically analytical'). There are correspondences here with a number of well-known writers—Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Yehuda Amichai—and the notes by Reid are uniformly helpful and occasionally amusing . . . If there’s one letter that sums up the personality that emerges in this collection, it’s a note Hughes sent to Philip Larkin on Nov. 21, 1985. Larkin and Hughes had been rivals for most of their lives, a fact of which both poets were acutely aware. In private, Larkin gave Hughes such compliments as 'He’s all right when not reading!'; Hughes returned the favor by complaining that various newspapers 'have prostrated themselves and finally deified' Larkin. Yet as Larkin lay dying, Hughes reached out with a letter of extraordinary tenderness and decency that is also possibly the most boneheaded piece of correspondence ever addressed to the mordant, brittle, doubting Larkin. Here’s what Hughes wrote: 'Ever since I heard you’d been into hospital I’ve been wanting to communicate something which for some reason I’ve assumed you’d reject outright. . . . I simply wanted to let you know somehow of the existence of a very strange and remarkable fellow down here, quite widely known for what seem to be miraculous healing powers. . . . He’s called Cornish. . . . He explains his "power" as some sort of energy that flows from him and galvanizes the patient’s own autoimmune system.' Bear in mind that these sentences are addressed to the author of a poem called 'Faith Healing,' which is not, to put it mildly, an endorsement of faith healing. The whole episode is so earnestly miscalculated as to achieve a kind of grandeur . . . It’s hard not to have sympathy for Hughes. However taxing his personality may have been for others, his own life was never easy, and he seems to have moved through it with more stoicism, good humor and humility than most writers manage. For him, little mattered but the poetry. As he writes: 'I hang on tooth and nail to my own view of what I do—which is a view from the inside. It is fatally easy to acquire, through other people, a view of one’s own work from the outside. As when a child is admired, in its hearing, for something it does naturally. Ever after—that something is corrupted with self-consciousness.' His work and life now exist in a place well beyond such self-consciousness, a place no less mythic than the realm populated by figures like Apollo, Asclepius and Bran."—David Orr, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a book, like the letters of Keats, which will be read in 200 years' time."—Philip Hensher, The Spectator

"This year's most surprising and rewarding book."—Blake Morrison, The Guardian

"Reid’s succinct annotation allows the full, unique personality to blaze out unimpeded, and the result is magnificent. No other English poet’s letters, not even Keats’s, unparalleled as they are, take us so intimately into the wellsprings of his own art."—John Carey, Sunday Times (London)

"Against death the poet Ted Hughes elaborated his own mythology. Birds and beasts were involved—crows, hawks, tigers, foxes, and wolves. So were metamorphosis, shamanism, and the collective unconscious—the White Goddess, the Ghost Dance, and Carl Jung. But he also wore Shakespeare like a second skin, and plundered as well the folklore and literatures of France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. It was a mishmash, this mythology—no wonder he was so forgiving of Yeats and his faeries—but no matter what you hear from those with a peculiar investment in blaming the crude philandering Hughes for the suicide of his brilliant and beautiful wife, Sylvia Plath, there was nothing 'primitive' about it. Hughes was as much a sophisticated student of anthropology and comparative religion as he was a radio playwright, a translator into English of Wedekind, Lorca, and Racine, and the author of more than a dozen books for children. Instead of primitive, all these modern poets may actually have been too highly evolved for the rude world they were stuck in; they grew gills for breathing not in water but in words. Still, such words! Letters of Ted Hughes, some three hundred of them selected and edited by Christopher Reid, is all performance and seduction. No matter whom he's writing to, the poet assembles a scaffold on which to stage his spectacle—a farce, a tirade, a wheedle, an insinuation, a brief for the prosecution or defense. The letters of Byron come to mind, and of D. H. Lawrence, and of Fla

ISBN-13: 9780374532086
ISBN-10: 0374532087
Publication Date: 3/30/2010
Pages: 784
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Letters & Correspondence

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