Ted Hughes in Context Edited by Terry Gifford Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42555-1 — Ted Hughes in Context Edited by Terry Gifford Frontmatter More Information

TEDHUGHESINCONTEXT

Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime’s reading, interests and experience gave him access. The achievement of Ted Hughes as one of the major poets of the twentieth century is com- plemented by his growing reputation as a writer of letters, plays, literary criticism and translations. In addition, Hughes made important contributions to education, literary history, emergent environ- mentalism and debates about life writing. Ted Hughes in Context brings together thirty-two contributors who inform new readings of the works and conceptualise Hughes’s work within long-standing critical traditions while acknowledging a new awareness of his future importance. This collection offers consideration not only of the most important aspects of Hughes’s work but also of the most neglected.

terry gifford is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities. He is also chair of The Ted Hughes Society and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

TED HUGHES IN CONTEXT

edited by TERRY GIFFORD Bath Spa University

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Contents

List of Contributors page ix Preface xv Chronology xix List of Abbreviations xxvi

part i literary contexts 1 1. Hughes and His Contemporaries 3 Jonathan Locke Hart 2. Hughes and Plath 13 Heather Clark 3. Hughes and Eliot 23 Ronald Schuchard 4. Hughes’s Literary Legacy 33 Fiona Sampson

part ii genre contexts 43 5. Hughes’s Writing for Children 45 Lissa Paul 6. Hughes and Drama 54 Jonathan Locke Hart 7. Hughes as Literary Critic 63 Alex Davis 8. Hughes as Translator 72 Tara Bergin 9. Hughes as Correspondent 82 Joanny Moulin

vi Contents part iii stylistic contexts 91 10. Hughes and Voice 93 Carrie Smith 11. Hughes and Surrealism 103 Sam Perry 12. Hughes and Eastern Europeans 113 Tara Bergin 13. Hughes and the Classics 123 Roger Rees 14. Hughes’s Collaboration with Artists 133 Lorraine Kerslake

part iv geocultural contexts 143 15. Hughes’s Yorkshire 145 Steve Ely 16. Hughes and America 155 Gillian Groszewski 17. Hughes and Ireland 165 Mark Wormald

part v anthropological contexts 175 18. Hughes and Religion 177 David Troupes 19. Hughes and Shamanism 187 Gregory Leadbetter 20. Hughes and the Occult 197 Ann Henning Jocelyn

part vi historical contexts 207 21. Hughes and the Middle Ages 209 James Robinson

Contents vii 22. Hughes and History 219 Daniel O’Connor 23. Hughes and War 228 Helen Melody 24. Hughes and the Laureateship 238 Neil Roberts

part vii gender contexts 249 25. Hughes and Feminism 251 Laura Blomvall 26. Hughes, Masculinity and Gender Identity 261 Janne Stigen Drangsholt

part viii environmental contexts 271 27. Hughes and Nature 273 Terry Gifford 28. Hughes and Agriculture 283 Jack Thacker 29. Hughes and Fishing 292 Mark Wormald 30. Hughes’s Environmental Campaigns 302 Yvonne Reddick

part ix educational contexts 313 31. Hughes and Creative Writing 315 Hugh Dunkerley 32. Hughes, Anthologising and Education 325 David Whitley

part x biographical contexts 335 33. Hughes’s Publication History 337 Mark Hinchliffe

viii Contents 34. Hughes’s Archives 347 Amanda Golden 35. Hughes and the Biographers 359 Claire Heaney 36. The Ted Hughes Myth 370 Daniel O’Connor

Index 379

Contributors

tara bergin From Dublin, Dr Bergin conducted her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky and has since published widely on the subject of poetic translation, including recent articles in Translation and Literature (2014) and Translating Holocaust Literature (2015). laura blomvall Educated at the University of Cambridge, University College London and University of York, Dr Blomvall completed her PhD on the limits of lyric poetry under the supervision of Derek Attridge and Hugh Haughton. A previous article entitled, ‘Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Biography, Poetry and Ethics’, appeared in The Ted Hughes Society Journal IV.1 (Summer 2014). heather clark Dr Clark is the author of The Grief of Inﬂuence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962– 1972. Her biography of Sylvia Plath is forthcoming. She is Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2016–17) and Visiting Research Scholar at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Graduate Center, CUNY. alex davis Professor Davis is Professor of English at University College Cork. He is the author of A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism (2000) and co-editor, with Lee M. Jenkins, of Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007) and A History of Modernist Poetry (2015). janne stigen drangsholt Dr Drangsholt is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Language Studies at the University of Stavanger. She has published three novels in Norwegian, among other critical and creative works. Her most recent publication is an article

x List of Contributors entitled, ‘Disclosing the World: Parousia in the Poetry of Ted Hughes’, in Literature and Theology. hugh dunkerley Dr Dunkerley’s most recent article is ‘Ted Hughes and the Ecological Sublime’,inThe Ted Hughes Society Journal VI.1. His poetry collection Hare will be followed by Kin in 2019. His prize- winning lecture, ‘Some Thoughts on Poetry and Fracking’, was deliv- ered at the 2016 Hay International Festival. He is Reader in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry and runs the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. steve ely Dr Ely has written ﬁve books of poetry and a novel. His book, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough, was published in 2015. Dr Ely teaches Creative Writing at Huddersﬁeld University, where he is Director of the Ted Hughes Network. terry gifford Professor Gifford has written or edited seven books on Ted Hughes, including Ted Hughes (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Chair of The Ted Hughes Society, he is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities. amanda golden Dr Golden is Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology. She previously held post-doctoral fellow- ships at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She is the author of Annotating Modernism and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton. gillian groszewski Dr Groszewski wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Ted Hughes and America at Trinity College Dublin. She has written book chapters on Hughes and Emily Dickinson for Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (2013) and on ‘Reading Ted Hughes through Structuralisms’ for Ted Hughes: A New Macmillan Casebook (2014). Dr Groszewski was president of The Ted Hughes Society and editor of The Ted Hughes Society Journal from 2013 to 2015. She teaches English at Chigwell School in Essex. jonathan locke hart Poet, literary critic and historian who was trained at Toronto and Cambridge universities, Professor Hart is Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and has had visiting appointments or research stays at Oxford, Toronto, Cambridge, Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Harvard and elsewhere. His books include

List of Contributors xi Empires and Colonies, Musing and The Poetics of Otherness. His maternal grandfather was from Harrogate in Yorkshire. claire heaney Dr Heaney teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast, where her doctoral research focused on issues of ethics and imagination in J. M. Coetzee. She has published on Coetzee, and her current post-doctoral work explores questions of human/animal relations and literary ethics in both Coetzee and Ted Hughes. ann henning jocelyn Ms Jocelyn is an author, playwright and translator with over a hundred published volumes and a number of stage plays to her name. Her play, Doonreagan, about Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill, has been widely performed. The West of Ireland homestead of Doonreagan, where Hughes spent a signiﬁcant period in the 1960s, has been her own home since 1982. mark hinchliffe Director and Deputy Chair of the Elmet Trust, Mr Hinchliffe was a correspondent with Hughes for twenty years and developed a remarkable collection of books and manuscripts. It was through buying Rainbow Press publications from Olwyn Hughes that he also developed a friendship with Ted’s sister. He writes: ‘I can still remember the exhilaration at seeing Ted’s signature in a copy of Earth- Moon, bought for me by my dad, and this feeling of excitement is one that I have never lost’. lorraine kerslake Dr Kerslake teaches English language and literature at Alicante University, Spain. She has worked as a translator of literary criticism, poetry and art. Her publications include articles on children’s literature, the representation of animals in art and literature, eco-criticism and eco-feminism. She has a PhD on Ted Hughes’s writing for children, on which a book is forthcoming from Routledge. gregory leadbetter Dr Leadbetter’s Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (2011) won the University English Book Prize in 2012.As a poet, his works include The Fetch (2016) and the pamphlet The Body in the Well (2007). He is Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University. helen melody Ms Melody is Lead Curator of the Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives at the British Library. She is a qualiﬁed archivist who joined the Library in 2008 as the cataloguer of the Ted Hughes archive. She subsequently catalogued the Olwyn Hughes letters, and although she now works more widely with the Library’s literary and

xii List of Contributors theatrical collections, she still has responsibility for the Hughes holdings. joanny moulin Professor Moulin is Professor of English Literature at Aix-Marseille University, France. He has authored and edited several books on Ted Hughes, including a critical study, Ted Hughes, la langue rémunérée (1999); a collection of essays, Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons (2005); and a biography, Ted Hughes: The Haunted Earth (2015). daniel o’connor Dr O’Connor teaches at the University of Liverpool and is the archivist for The Ted Hughes Society. A contributor to Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected and New Casebooks: Ted Hughes, Dr O’Connor is the author of Burning the Foxes: Ted Hughes and Trauma (2016). lissa paul Dr Paul is a professor at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, an associate general editor for The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and co-editor of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2011). She began publishing on Hughes’s work for children in 1986, and her most recent essay appeared in The Ted Hughes Society Journal V:1 (January 2016). sam perry Dr Perry is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hull. He is the author of Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition (2013) and is currently working on his next book, Creatures of Light: The Poetry of Childhood. yvonne reddick Dr Reddick researches eco-poetics and postcolonial ecocriticism. Her monograph, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet, was published in 2017, and her work on Hughes has been published in journals such as ISLE, English and Cambridge Quarterly. She has won a Northern Writer's Award for her poetry which also forms part of a national touring exhibition. roger rees Dr Rees studied at Cambridge and at St Andrews, where he is now Reader in Latin. The perennial focus of his work is praise discourse in the ancient Roman world. He edited Ted Hughes and the Classics in the Oxford University Press Classical Presences series (2009). neil roberts Professor Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Shefﬁeld and Honorary Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is co-author of Ted Hughes: A Critical Study, author of Ted Hughes: A Literary Life

List of Contributors xiii and Reading Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems and co-editor of Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected. His most recent books are A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove and Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel. james robinson Dr Robinson teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is the author of Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and is currently working on a book, Ted Hughes and Medieval Literature: ‘Deliberate Afﬁliation’, the research for which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. fiona sampson Professor Sampson is Professor of Poetry and Poetry Centre Director at the University of Roehampton. Recent books include On the White Plain: The Search for Mary Shelley (2018), Limestone Country (2017), Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form (2016) and The Catch (2016). ronald schuchard Professor Schuchard, the Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emeritus, at Emory University, is the author of Eliot’s Dark Angel, editor of Eliot’s The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry and general editor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Schuchard is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. carrie smith Dr Smith is Lecturer at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on the literary manuscripts of Ted Hughes, tracing the devel- opment of his composition techniques and focusing on his poetry readings and recordings and his partnership with Leonard Baskin. Dr Smith has co-edited a collection of essays entitled, The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation. jack thacker Mr Thacker is a PhD candidate at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter researching the georgic mode in contemporary British and Irish poetry. He has published in The Ted Hughes Society Journal and in The Cambridge Quarterly. He is the winner of the 2016 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. david troupes Dr Troupes completed a PhD on Ted Hughes and Christianity at Shefﬁeld University. Along with other chapters and articles on Hughes, he has published two collections of poetry, and a selection of his recent work was included in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI.

xiv List of Contributors david whitley Dr Whitley is Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University, where he teaches ﬁlm, poetry and children’s literature. He is particularly interested in the way the arts offer different forms of understanding and engagement with the natural world. His most recent book is The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2012). mark wormald Dr Wormald is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was the co-editor, with Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, of Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (2013) and is the editor of the Ted Hughes Society Journal. His book, The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes, was published in 2018.

Preface

Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime’s reading, interests and experience gave him access. No single scholar could know all that Hughes knew or even have read all that Hughes had read during his sixty-eight years. But the thirty-four authorities who have combined their expertise here offer the most complete survey yet assembled of information and insights towards understanding Ted Hughes in context. In addition to being one of the major English poets of the twentieth century, all his life Hughes wrote poetry, criticism, letters, and stories and plays for children, many of them for radio. Early and late in his career, he wrote play scripts for radio and theatre, latterly making popular translations of both classical and modern plays. Indeed, his interest in translation is another life-long theme, as are his role as a literary critic and his collaboration with visual artists. Hughes’s letters often reveal to his correspondents just how the ideas behind the briefest of poems can be drawn from a vast range of cultural and literary contexts which, in his mind, are all connected. Writing to former Cambridge student friend, poet Peter Redgrove, about a poem for Shakespeare’s birthday, ‘An Alchemy’,in1973, Hughes references not only the poem’s starting point as an engagement with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis but also ‘the Mary Goddess of the Middle Ages’, ‘archaic Palestine, Babylon and Egypt’, the English Civil War, Milton, ‘Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, (Hopkins), Yeats and Eliot’ before saying, ‘None of this is in the poem, but it shows you how I regard the ideas – which have grown like feathers [on] the dead end of things’ (LTH 336). Tuning into the sources of ideas that grow within a text presents a complex challenge to the reader of Hughes’s works since they draw upon a huge diversity of cultural sources, each having its own historical and literary resonances that have a particular signiﬁcance in Hughes’s reading of them. Indeed, Hughes admits to Redgrove in this letter that ultimately ‘An

xvi Preface Alchemy’ is ‘a literary historical comment rather than a poem’, and it remained a poem that Hughes never collected. In fact, a reading of the Introduction to Hughes’s recently published anthology, A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (1971), would have been enough for a reader to appreci- ate this poem as a personal riff on the Complete Works charged with the narrative drive of what Hughes called ‘the tragic equation’ behind the Works. There are, at times, felicitous intimate juxtapositions of characters and images that attempt to move towards a kind of understanding ‘deeper’ than Prospero’s ‘sounding Book’, which leaves the magician/poet, by the poem’s end, in a ﬁnal state of humility before Shakespeare’s achievement. But Hughes was surely right to imply that, as a poem, it was one which was drowned by the weight of its contexts. As the poem itself hints, a ‘sounding Book’ is actually no longer even a book. It is well known that at Cambridge in 1953 Hughes changed his studies from English to Archaeology and Anthropology, which opened up to him all the esoteric oral literatures of the world. But it also gave him access to cultural practices and functions of poetry, narrative and ritual drama that enriched his thinking about his own practices in the various genres in which he pursued a remarkably consistent artistic quest. It is not surpris- ing, then, to realise that the ten groupings of contexts of his work explored in this book each inform the other and should not be regarded as entirely discrete categories. Any single chapter may be found to offer additional insights into any other. Where there might appear to be obvious gaps, it will be found that material is actually included elsewhere. A chapter speciﬁcally on Hughes’s radio work, for example, is not included in the ‘Genre Contexts’ section because this aspect of his work is discussed in three other chapters: on drama, on his writing for children and the chapter on Hughes’s use of voice. While Devon, Hughes’s home from 1961, is not isolated as a chapter in ‘Geocultural Contexts’, it has a strong presence in chapters on ‘Hughes and Agriculture’, ‘Hughes and Fishing’ and ‘Hughes’s Environmental Campaigns’. A chapter on ‘Hughes and Shakespeare’ might be thought of as a serious omission here until one is reminded of Jonathan Bate’s authoritative chapter on this subject in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011).1 Likewise Ann Skea’s essay on Hughes’s Goddess, freely available on her Ted Hughes website, would be hard to surpass, and it is referenced here appropriately.2 The book begins by distinguishing Hughes’s poetic interests and achievements in relation to his contemporaries, in particular, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. It seems appropriate to end this opening section on ‘Literary Contexts’ with a consideration of

Preface xvii ‘Hughes’s Literary Legacy’. There follow chapters on five different genres that mark Hughes’s achievement in addition to that of a poet, for which a single chapter would be absurdly inadequate; the poetic achievement is so central to all his work that it is evidenced throughout this book. The five ‘Stylistic Contexts’ are necessarily selective but contain new material deftly discussed by experts in their fields. Similarly, a wealth of detail is revealed in the ‘Geopolitical Contexts’ of Yorkshire, America and Ireland. The sometimes difficult, or puzzling, area of Hughes’s interests that might be called ‘Anthropological Contexts’ provides the opportunity to clarify the influences of religion, shamanism and the occult. Four chapters consider ‘Historical Contexts’ beginning with the literary importance of texts from the Middle Ages and ending with an understanding of Hughes’s position in the tradition of the Laureateship. The two chapters on ‘Gender Contexts’ complement each other as issues of reception are discussed in relation to representations of gender identity in the works themselves. In ‘Environmental Contexts’ an overview of the shifts in Hughes’s stances towards nature introduces interests dealt with in the following chapters on fishing, agriculture and environmental campaigning. Often acknowledged, but without detailed consideration, are Hughes’s ‘Educational Contexts’, so these two chapters should be recognised as pioneering Hughes scholarship. Ted Hughes in Context devotes its concluding grouping of chapters to an invitation to future students, researchers and biographers to explore the Hughes archives, offering a consideration of the challenges for biographers, not least from the ‘Ted Hughes Myth’ that the poet himself created. No single book has, thus far, attempted to explore such a range of contexts within which Hughes wrote, although the twelve chapters of The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011) might be considered as the first to approach such a project. New Casebooks: Ted Hughes (2015) took twelve different theoretical approaches to Hughes’s works, and the latest collection of papers from what have now been seven international confer- ences on Hughes has been published as Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Wormald, Roberts and Gifford, eds., 2013). A volume of essays from the 2015 conference, Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (Roberts, Wormald and Gifford, eds.) is in preparation. Of course, Jonathan Bate’s recent biography, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (2015), has renewed public interest in the poet, whilst recent monographs have included Ted Hughes: The Haunted Earth by Joanny Moulin (2015), Ted Hughes by Terry Gifford (2009) and Ted Hughes: A Literary Life by Neil Roberts (2006). Perhaps an indication of the depth of material available for discussion within just two contexts of his work are the publication of Ted

xviii Preface Hughes and the Classics (2009) edited by Roger Rees and Ted Hughes and Trauma (2016) by Daniel O’Connor. Forthcoming books on other specific contexts include The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes by Mark Wormald, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet by Yvonne Reddick, Ted Hughes and America by Gillian Groszewski, Ted Hughes and Medieval Literature by James Robinson and The Page Is Printed: Manuscript, Composition and Ted Hughes’s Poetic Process by Carrie Smith. All seven of these scholars have written chapters on their specialisms for Ted Hughes in Context. Since 2011, The Ted Hughes Society has been publishing a peer- reviewed journal devoted to scholarship on Hughes. Monographs and edited collections of essays on Hughes’s works continue to be published, reflecting the ongoing popularity of his writing with readers and within education at all levels, increasing internationally (a first book about Hughes’s work appeared in Chinese in 2012 written by Chen Hong). Yet, we will have to wait for a follow-up to Winter Pollen of collected prose pieces and for further selections of letters. It is ten years since Christopher Reid made, in Letters of Ted Hughes, his selection of a quarter of what he said he could have assembled without diminution of quality or interest. ‘Many of Hughes’s letters are prose poems, magnificent works of art in their own right,’ writes Jonathan Bate, anticipating that the letters between Hughes and Heaney in particular ‘will come to be regarded as a literary monument akin to the letters that passed between Wordsworth and Coleridge or T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’.3 It is to be hoped that before too many letters are lost we shall hear of plans for a scholarly multi-volume Collected Letters, as has recently been published for Sylvia Plath. As Ted Hughes was fond of writing as a dedication when he signed books for friends, ‘Before us stands yesterday’. And hopefully, for readers ofTed Hughes in Context, before us stand newly informed and enriched readings of the works of Ted Hughes that this book hopes to make possible.

Notes

1. Jonathan Bate, ‘Hughes on Shakespeare’,inThe Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, ed. Terry Gifford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135–49. See also Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 223–41. 2. http://ann.skea.com/THandGoddess.html. 3. Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (London: William Collins, 2015), p. 555.

Chronology

17 August 1930 Born 1 Aspinall St, Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, to William Henry and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes. September 1938 Hughes, age eight, moves with family to Mexborough, South Yorkshire, where they own a newspaper and a tobacco shop. 1942 Mexborough Grammar School. 1945 First poems written. 1946 First poems published in school magazine, Don and Dearne. 1948 Wins scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge University. 1949 National service in the Royal Air Force. 1951 Enters Pembroke College, Cambridge to study English. 1952 Parents return to West Yorkshire to run a shop in Hebden Bridge, living ﬁrst in Todmorden and then at The Beacon, Heptonstall. 1953 Fox dream: drops English to study archaeology and anthropology. 1954 Publishes poems in student magazines under pseudonyms Daniel Hearing and Peter Crew. Graduates from Cambridge. 1955–6 Living in 18 Rugby Street, London, and in Cambridge at weekends. Security guard, dish washer at London Zoo, reader for J. Arthur Rank. 25 February 1956 At the launch of Saint Botolph’s Review, meets Sylvia Plath.

xix

xx Chronology 16 June 1956 Married Sylvia Plath at St George the Martyr’s Church, Bloomsbury, London. July–August 1956 Honeymoon at 59 Tomas Ortunio, Benidorm, Spain. November 1956 Living at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge. Teaching English and drama at Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys. April 1957 First poem, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, read on BBC radio. June 1957 To Plath’s home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA, then on holiday at Eastham, Cape Cod. August 1957 To 337 Elm Street, Northampton, Massachusetts, where Sylvia teaches at Smith College. September 1957 Hawk in the Rain published. Spring semester 1958 Hughes teaches at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as instructor in English Literature and Creative Writing. May 1958 Meets Leonard Baskin. August 1958 Rents ﬂat in 9 Willow Street, Beacon Hill, Boston. Summer 1959 Crossing America by car. September 1959 Yaddo Artists’ Colony for eleven weeks. Meets Chou Wen-Chung and begins collaboration on Bardo Thödol. December 1959 Return to parents’ home in Heptonstall. February 1960 Move to 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London. March 1960 Lupercal published. 1 April 1960 Daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes, born at home in London. May 1960 First story, ‘The Rain Horse’, read on BBC radio. April 1961 Meet My Folks published. August 1961 Sells lease on London ﬂat to David and Assia Wevill and move to Court Green, North Tawton, Devon. November 1961 First radio play, The House of Aries, produced by BBC. 17 January 1962 Nicholas Farrar Hughes born at Court Green.

Chronology xxi May 1962 Selected Poems with Thom Gunn published. 18 May 1962 David and Assia Wevill visit for the weekend. 10 July 1962 Plath insists on separation. Hughes leaves to live in London. 26 July 1962 Hughes and Plath travel to Wales together for three days for a joint poetry reading. 13 September 1962 Hughes and Plath visit Ireland to find her a house to rent near Richard Murphy. 11 February 1963 Sylvia Plath’s suicide. November 1963 How the Whale Became. November 1963 The Earth-Owl and Other Moon People. April 1964 Nessie the Mannerless Monster. 3 March 1965 Assia’s daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Eloise Wevill (Shura), born. Autumn 1965 Modern Poetry in Translation (first editorial with Daniel Weissbort). February 1966 Ted and Assia move to Connemara, Ireland, with the children, although returned to Court Green later in the year. May 1967 Wodwo. July 1967 Hughes, with Patrick Garland, founds the first Poetry International with Hughes speaking and writing broadsheet and programme notes. October 1967 Assia and Shura move to London from Court Green. December 1967 Poetry in the Making (five BBC radio broadcasts). February 1968 The Iron Man. 1968 The Arvon Foundation established by John Fairfax and John Moat with Hughes’s support. 23 March 1969 Deaths of Assia and Shura Wevill. 11 May 1969 Death of Hughes’s mother, Edith Hughes. Autumn 1969 Purchase of Lumb Bank. December 1969 Seneca’s Oedipus published, having opened in March 1968. 19 August 1970 Marriage to Carol Orchard. October 1970 Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. April–September 1971 Works with Peter Brook in Paris before going to the Shiraz Festival, Persia, to produce Orghast.

xxii Chronology 1971 Rainbow Press founded by Olwyn and Ted Hughes. October 1972 Selected Poems 1957–67. 1972 Buys Moortown Farm land (ninety-ﬁve acres) and runs it with Carol’s father, Jack Orchard. 1974 Awarded Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. 30 May 1975 Cave Birds and Lumb’s Remains performed at the Ilkley Literature Festival. October 1975 Season Songs. February 1976 Death of Jack Orchard. November 1976 Moon Whales. May 1977 Gaudete. 1977 Awarded OBE. February 1978 Moon Bells. October 1978 Cave Birds. May 1979 Remains of Elmet. October 1979 Moortown. 1979 Fishing in Iceland with Nicholas. 1980 Fishing in Alaska with Nicholas. February 1981 Death of father, William Hughes. March 1981 Under the North Star. February 1982 New Selected Poems 1957–81. October 1982 The Rattle Bag, edited with Seamus Heaney. September 1983 River. June 1984 What Is the Truth? December 1984 Appointed Poet Laureate. August 1986 Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth. October 1986 Flowers and Insects. June 1988 Tales of the Early World. September 1989 Moortown Diary. September 1989 Wolfwatching. Spring 1990 Capriccio (ﬁfty copies at $4,000 each). April 1992 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. June 1992 Rain Charm for the Duchy. June 1993 Three Books. September 1993 The Iron Woman. March 1994 Winter Pollen. October 1994 Elmet. March 1995 New Selected Poems 1957–94. March 1995 The Dream Fighter.

Chronology xxiii August 1995 Spring Awakening performed at the Barbican Theatre, London. October 1995 Difﬁculties of a Bridegroom. October 1995 Collected Animal Poems (four volumes). October 1996 Blood Wedding performed at the Young Vic Theatre, London. March 1997 Archive of ninety-two linear feet in 186 boxes sold to Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Late spring 1997 Begins treatment for cancer. 1997 The School Bag, edited with Seamus Heaney. 1997 Tales from Ovid. 1998 Phèdre performed at the Malvern Literary Festival and the Almeida Theatre, London. January 1998 Birthday Letters. January 1998 Tales from Ovid wins the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. March 1998 Tales from Ovid wins the W. H. Smith Literature Award. Spring 1998 Howls and Whispers (100 copies at $4,000 each plus ten deluxe copies). October 1998 Forward Prize for Poetry awarded to Birthday Letters. August 1998 Appointment announced: member of the Queen’s Order of Merit. 28 October 1998 Ted Hughes dies. January 1999 Birthday Letters wins T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. January 1999 Birthday Letters wins the South Bank Award for Literature. January 1999 Birthday Letters wins the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. April 1999 Tales from Ovid performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford. 10 May 1999 Quentin Blake named ﬁrst Children’s Laureate, a post founded by Hughes and Michael Morpurgo. 13 May 1999 Memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

xxiv Chronology August 1999 The Iron Giant, Brad Bird’s animated film ver- sion of The Iron Man, is distributed by Warner Bros. December 1999 The Oresteia performed at the National Theatre, London. September 2000 Alcestis performed by Barry Rutter’s Northern Broadsides Theatre Company at Dean Clough, Halifax, West Yorkshire. 2001 Elaine Feinstein publishes Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet. 2003 Collected Poems, edited by Paul Keegan, published. 2005 Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs, published. March 2006 The Elmet Trust founded in Mytholmroyd to advance interest in Ted Hughes. June 2007 First annual Ted Hughes Festival at Mytholmroyd organised by the Elmet Trust. November 2007 Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, published. 2008 British Library publishes The Spoken Word: Ted Hughes, two boxes of double CDs of BBC broadcasts by Hughes. 21 June 2008 Carol Hughes and Simon Armitage open 1 Aspinall St, Mytholmroyd, now for let by the Elmet Trust. November 2008 The Artist and the Poet: Leonard Baskin and Ted Hughes in Conversation 1983, a documentary DVD by Noel Chanan, published. 16 March 2009 Nicholas Hughes takes his own life in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he had worked as a fish biologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. April 2009 The Story of Vasco performed at the Orange Tree Theatre, London. June 2009 Phèdre performed at the National Theatre, London. September 2009 Timmy the Tug published. March 2010 Alice Oswald’s Weeds and Wildflowers is the first winner of the Ted Hughes Award for

Chronology xxv New Work in Poetry, established in 2009 by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. June 2010 British Library opens large addition to the Ted Hughes archive of 118 boxes. October 2010 Poem ‘Last Letter’, from a Birthday Letters notebook in the British Library, published, with great media interest, in the New Statesman on 11 October. 2011 First issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal published online. December 2011 Stone laid in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. 2012 Gerald Hughes publishes Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir. 2015 Jonathan Bate publishes Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. August 2018 ‘The Eighth International Conference on Ted Hughes’ held at Cardiff University.

Abbreviations

All references are to the British first editions of Faber & Faber unless otherwise indicated, so the abbreviation SGCB refers to the first 1992 edition of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. References to SGCB in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 refer to the second (1993) edition, and the endnotes indicate this. Editions of Winter Pollen and of Jonathan Bate’s biography vary between editions, but all quotations from these books are from hardback first editions unless otherwise stated in the endnotes. If poems are published in Collected Poems, they are referenced there. When referencing the two major Ted Hughes archives, ‘Emory’ refers to the Stuart Rose Rare Books and Manuscript Collection at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, University of Emory, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and ‘BL’ refers to the Ted Hughes collections at the British Library, London, UK.

A Alcestis BL Birthday Letters CP Collected Poems Ffangs Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth G Gaudete HW Howls and Whispers (Lurley: Gehenna Press, 1998) LTH Letters of Ted Hughes MPT Modern Poetry in Translation O The Oresteia OD Oedipus PC Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, ed. Keith Sagar (London: British Library, 2012) PM Poetry in the Making RE Remains of Elmet SGCB Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

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List of Abbreviations xxvii SO Seneca’s Oedipus ST Selected Translations TB Three Books TO Tales from Ovid W Wodwo WP Winter Pollen