Ted Hughes
(1930–1998)

A major contemporary poet, Ted Hughes has been widely praised for his portrayal of nature in all its fierceness and primitive cruelty. Hughes differs from "the Movement" poets, who, he says, "wanted it cozy." There is nothing cozy about Hughes's starkly defined animal world. His diction, in the word of one critic, is "a solid phalanx of buffering verbs and steel-heeled nouns." Yet Hughes, despite his verbal violence, shows a masterful ability to describe nature, seeking a link between its universal force and the human condition.

The poet, born Edward J. Hughes grew up in the rural region of western Yorkshire, served in the Royal Air Force, and attended Pambroke College in Cambridge. In 1956, he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple lived in the United States for two years. Plath died in 1963.

Nature is a dominant theme in Hughes's poetry. His first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, appeared in 1957 and brought him immediate success. Crow (1970), Crow Wakes (1971) and Eat Crow (1972), reveal his characteristic style. In them, an animal observer comments upon the human condition. Because of his use of animal characters, Hughes has been compared to both Aesop and George Orwell.

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