Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

The poet Ted Hughes, was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930. His father, William, was a joiner who had fought in the First World War; his mother, Edith was a tailor who loved walking, and bought Hughes a small second-hand library of poetry after he was praised by his English teacher.

The family bought a newsagents in Mexborough, South Yorkshire when Hughes was seven, and Hughes went to the local grammar school, where he read Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter, and roamed to Manor Farm, on the nearby River Don at Old Denaby. He came to know it ‘better than any place on earth’, and his first animal poem, ‘The Thought Fox’, and first story, ‘The Rain Horse’, are both based on its memory.

Hughes’s writing is immensely various, and almost always passionately concerned with the relationship between nature and industry. It ranges from popular children’s books such as The Iron Man (1968), to critical works such as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992), adaptations and translations such as Tales from Ovid (1997) and Crow (1970), an epic sequence interrupted when his partner Assia Wevill took her own life.