Ted Hughes | |
|---|---|
 Hughes in later life | |
| Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom | |
| In office 28 December 1984 – 28 October 1998 | |
| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Preceded by | Sir John Betjeman |
| Succeeded by | Andrew Motion |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1930-08-17)17 August 1930 Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 28 October 1998(1998-10-28) (aged 68) London, England |
| Spouses | |
| Domestic partner(s) | Assia Wevill (1962–1969) |
| Children |
|
| Alma mater | Pembroke College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Poet, playwright, writer |
Edward James HughesOM OBE FRSL (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998)[1] was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointedPoet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008,The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatestBritish writers since 1945".
He married fellow poetSylvia Plath, an American, in 1956. They lived together in the United States and then in England, in what was known to be a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962. Plath ended her own life in 1963.
Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, inMytholmroyd in theWest Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969).[2] He was raised among the local farms of theCalder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. The third child, Hughes had a brother Gerald (1920–2016),[3] who was ten years older.[4] Next came their sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016), who was two years older than Ted.
One of their mother's ancestors,Nicholas Ferrar, had founded theLittle Gidding community.[5] Most of the more recent generations of the family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area.
Hughes's father, William, ajoiner, was of Irish descent.[6][7] He had enlisted with theLancashire Fusiliers in theFirst World War and fought atYpres. He narrowly escaped being killed; he was saved when a bullet hit him but lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket.[5] He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from theDardanelles Campaign (1915–16).[8]
The stories ofFlanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out").[9] Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything".[10]
Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven. After his family moved toMexborough, he attended Schofield Street Junior School.[5] His parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop in the town.[4]
InPoetry in Making, Hughes recalled that he was fascinated by animals, collecting, and drawing toy lead creatures. He acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shotmagpies, owls, rats, andcurlews. He grew up amid the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors.[9]
During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at OldDenaby. He later said that he came to know it "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse", were recollections of the area. At the age of about 13 a friend, John Wholey, took Hughes to his home at Crookhill Lodge, on the Crookhill estate aboveConisbrough. There the boys could fish and shoot. Hughes became close to the Wholey family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholey's father, the head gardener andgamekeeper on the estate. Hughes came to view fishing as an almost religious experience.[5]
Hughes attendedMexborough Secondary School (later Grammar School), where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry. Teachers Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to the poetsGerard Manley Hopkins andT.S. Eliot. Hughes was also mentored by teacher John Fisher, and his own sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry.[5][11] Future poetHarold Massingham also attended this school and was mentored by Fisher. In 1946, one of Hughes's early poems, "Wild West", and a short story were published in the grammar school magazineThe Don and Dearne. He published further poems in 1948.[4] By 16, he had no other thought than being a poet.[5]
During the same year, Hughes won an openexhibition in English atPembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do hisnational service first.[12] His two years of national service (1949–1951) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in theRAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire. During this time, he had little to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow".[4] He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities ofW. B. Yeats's poetry.[5]
In 1951 Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority onballadic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodgart's supervision, but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary tradition.[5][13] He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent forLeavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself."[5] In his third year, he transferred toAnthropology andArchaeology, both of which would later inform his poetry.[14] He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954.[15][16]
His first published poetry appeared inChequer.[15] A poem, "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published inGranta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.[17]
After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes had many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for the British film companyJ. Arthur Rank. He worked atLondon Zoo as a washer-upper,[18] a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters.[15]
On 25 February 1956,[19] Hughes and his friends held a party to launchSt. Botolph's Review, which had a single issue. In it, Hughes had four poems. At the party, he met American poetSylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on aFulbright Scholarship.[20] She had already published extensively, having won various awards, and had come to the party especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. Hughes and Plath felt a great mutual attraction, but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath passed through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later.[citation needed]
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, atSt George the Martyr, Holborn, four months after they had first met. They chose the date,Bloomsday, in honour of Irish writerJames Joyce.[5] Plath's mother was the only wedding guest. The couple spent most of their honeymoon atBenidorm, inAlicante on Spain'sCosta Blanca.[22]
Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not tell him about her history of depression and suicide attempts until much later.[5] Reflecting later inBirthday Letters, Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers.[22]
On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published inThe Nation,Poetry, andThe Atlantic.[23] Plath typed up Hughes's manuscript for his collectionHawk in the Rain, which won a competition run by the Poetry centre of theYoung Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York.[22] The first prize was publication byHarper. Hughes gained widespread critical acclaim after the book's release in September 1957, including aSomerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard-hittingtrochees andspondees reminiscent ofMiddle English — a style he used throughout his career — over the more genteel latinate sounds.[5]
The couple moved to the United States in 1957 so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater,Smith College. During this time, Hughes taught at theUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958, they met artistLeonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes's books, includingCrow.[22]
The couple returned to England in 1959, staying for a short while back inHeptonstall and then finding a small flat inPrimrose Hill, London. They were both writing: Hughes was working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews, and talks.[24] During this time, he wrote the poems that would later be published inRecklings (1966) andWodwo (1967).
In March 1960, his bookLupercal was published, and it won theHawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals.[5] Hughes began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism, withThe Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s.[25] He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche, and poetry was the language of that work.[5]
Hughes and Plath had two children,Frieda Hughes (b. 1960) andNicholas Hughes (1962–2009). In 1961, they bought the houseCourt Green, inNorth Tawton, Devon.
In the summer of 1962, Hughes began an affair withAssia Wevill, who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under the cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962. Plath moved back to London and set up life in a new flat with the children.[26][27]
Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her, including an incident two days before she miscarried their second child in 1961.[28]
Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963.[29]
Hughes dramatically wrote in a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous."[30][31] Some people argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide.[32][33][34] Plath's gravestone inHeptonstall was repeatedly vandalized. Some people were aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on her stone and attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath".[33]
Plath's poem "The Jailer", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in the 1970 anthologySisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement.[35] PoetRobin Morgan published a poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath.[33][36]
There were lawsuits resulting from the controversy. Morgan's 1972 bookMonster, which contained that poem was banned. Underground, pirated editions of it were published.[37] Other radical feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.[38] In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages ofThe Guardian andThe Independent. InThe Guardian on 20 April 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace":
In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early... If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech... The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.[33][39]
As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the posthumous publication of her manuscripts, includingAriel (1965). Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book.[29] Others who were critical of Hughes personally argued that he had essentially driven Plath to suicide and should not be responsible for her literary legacy.[40][29] He claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath's journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword toThe Journals of Sylvia Plath, he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple's young children.
Following Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote two poems, "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat". He did not write poetry again for three years. He broadcast extensively, wrote critical essays, and became involved in running Poetry International withPatrick Garland andCharles Osborne, in the hopes of connecting English poetry with the rest of the world.
In 1966, he wrote poems to accompanyLeonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrativeThe Life and Songs of the Crow, one of the works for which Hughes is best known.[5] In 1967, while living with Wevill, Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister. Gerald Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was offered for sale in 2012.[41]
On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide, Assia Wevill took her own life by the same method: asphyxiation from a gas stove. Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965. These deaths resulted in reports that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.[42][43][44] Hughes did not finish theCrow sequence until after his workCave Birds was published in 1975.[5]
In August 1970, Hughes married a second time, to Carol Orchard, a nurse. They were together until his death. Heather Clark in her biography of Plath,Red Comet (2021), observed that Hughes "would never be faithful to a woman after he left Plath".[45]
Hughes bought a house known as Lumb Bank nearHebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, while still maintaining the property atCourt Green. He also began cultivating a small farm nearWinkleigh, Devon, calledMoortown; he used this name as the title of one of his poetry collections. Later he served as the president of the charityFarms for City Children, established by his friendMichael Morpurgo inIddesleigh.[46]
In 1970 Hughes and his sister Olwyn[47] set up the Rainbow Press. Between 1971 and 1981, it published sixteen titles, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes,Ruth Fainlight,Thom Gunn, andSeamus Heaney. The works were printed by Daedalus Press in Norfolk,[48]Rampant Lions Press, and the John Roberts Press.
Hughes was appointedPoet Laureate in December 1984, followingSir John Betjeman. A collection of his animal poems for children had been published by Faber earlier that year,What is the Truth?, illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. For that work he won the annualGuardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award.[49]
Hughes wrote many works for children. He also collaborated closely withPeter Brook and theNational Theatre Company.[50] He dedicated himself to theArvon Foundation, which promotes writing education and has run residential writing courses at Lumb Bank.[50]
In 1993, Hughes made a rare television appearance forChannel 4, reading passages from his 1968 novelThe Iron Man. He was featured in the 1994 documentarySeven Crows A Secret.[51]
In early 1994, increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home, Hughes became involved in conservation activism. He was one of the founding trustees of theWestcountry Rivers Trust, a charity established to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.[52]
Hughes was appointed a member of theOrder of Merit byQueen Elizabeth II just before he died. He had continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal heart attack on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment forcolon cancer inSouthwark, London.
On 3 November 1998, his funeral was held atNorth Tawton church, and he was cremated inExeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poetSeamus Heaney, said:
"No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken."[53]
On 16 March 2009,Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide in his home inAlaska. He had suffered from depression.[54]
In January 2013, Carol Hughes announced that she would write a memoir of their marriage.The Times headlined its story "Hughes's widow breaks silence to defend his name" and observed that "for more than 40 years she has kept her silence, never once joining in the furious debate that has raged around the late Poet Laureate since the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath."[55]
Hughes's brother Gerald published a memoir late in 2014,Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir.Kirkus Reviews described it as "a warm recollection of a lauded poet".[56]
Crow Blacker Than Ever
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing heaven and earth together-
So man cried, but with God's voice.
And God bled, but with man's blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank-
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: "This is my Creation,"
Flying the black flag of himself.
Hughes's first collection,The Hawk in the Rain (1957), attracted considerable critical acclaim. In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize, which brought $5,000. His most significant work is perhapsCrow (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse. Crow was edited several times across Hughes' career. Within its opus he created a cosmology of the totemic Crow who was simultaneously God, Nature and Hughes' alter ego. The publication ofCrow shaped Hughes' poetic career as distinct from other forms of English Nature Poetry.
In a 1971 interview withThe London Magazine, Hughes cited his main influences as includingBlake,Donne,Hopkins, andEliot. He mentioned alsoSchopenhauer,Robert Graves's bookThe White Goddess, andThe Tibetan Book of the Dead.[58]
Hughes worked for 10 years on aprose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film. It tells the story of the vicar of an English village who is carried off by elemental spirits, and replaced in the village by hisenantiodromic double, a changeling, fashioned from a log, who nevertheless has the same memories as the original vicar. The double is a force of nature who organises the women of the village into a "love coven" in order that he may father a new messiah. When the male members of the community discover what is going on, they murder him. The epilogue consists of a series of lyrics spoken by the restored priest in praise of a nature goddess, inspired byRobert Graves'sWhite Goddess. It was printed in 1977. Hughes was very interested in the relationship between his poetry and the book arts, and many of his books were produced by notable presses and in collaborative editions with artists, for instance withLeonard Baskin.[59]
In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. HisTales from Ovid (1997) contains a selection offree verse translations fromOvid'sMetamorphoses. He also wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books beingThe Iron Man, written to comfort his children after their mother Sylvia Plath's suicide. It later became the basis ofPete Townshend's 1989rock musical of the same name, and of the 1999 animated filmThe Iron Giant, the latter of which is dedicated to his memory.
Hughes was appointedPoet Laureate in 1984 following the death ofJohn Betjeman. It was later known that Hughes was second choice for the appointment.Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, had declined, because of ill health and a loss of creative momentum, dying a year later. Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998. In 1992 Hughes publishedShakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a monumental work inspired by Graves'sThe White Goddess.[60] The book, considered Hughes's key work of prose, had a mixed reception "divided between those who considered it an important and original appreciation of Shakespeare's complete works, whilst others dismissed it as a lengthy and idiosyncratic appreciation of Shakespeare refracted by Hughes's personal belief system". Hughes himself later suggested that the time spent writing prose was directly responsible for a decline in his health.[61] Also in 1992, Hughes publishedRain Charm for the Duchy, collecting together for the first time his Laureate works, including poems celebrating important royal occasions. The book also contained a section of notes throwing light on the context and genesis of each poem.[62]
In 1998, hisTales from Ovid won theWhitbread Book of the Year Award. InBirthday Letters, his last collection, Hughes broke his silence on Plath, detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time. The book, the cover artwork for which was by their daughterFrieda, won the 1999Whitbread Prize for poetry.[63]
Hughes's definitive 1,333-pageCollected Poems (Faber & Faber) appeared (posthumously) in 2003. A poem discovered in October 2010, "Last letter", describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide.[64] It was published inNew Statesman on National Poetry Day, October 2010. Poet LaureateCarol Ann Duffy toldChannel 4 News that the poem was "the darkest poem he has ever written" and said that for her it was "almost unbearable to read".[65]
In 2011, several previously unpublished letters from Hughes toCraig Raine were published in the literary reviewAreté.[66] They relate mainly to the process of editingShakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and also contain a sequence of drafts of letters in which Raine attempts to explain to Hughes his disinclination to publish Hughes's poemThe Cast in an anthology he was editing, on the grounds that it might open Hughes to further attack on the subject of Sylvia Plath. "Dear Ted, Thanks for the poem. It is very interesting and would cause a minor sensation" (4 April 1997). The poem was eventually published inBirthday Letters and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997).
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.[67] Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for thesurvival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar".[67]
TheWest Riding dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.[11]
Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the Britishbardic tradition, heavily inflected with amodernist,Jungian, and ecological viewpoint.[67] He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.[67]
In 1965, he founded withDaniel Weissbort the journalModern Poetry in Translation, which involved bringing to the attention of the West the work ofCzesław Miłosz, who would later go on to win theNobel Prize in Literature. Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known, from such countries as Poland and Hungary, then controlled by the Soviet Union. Hughes wrote an introduction to a translation ofVasko Popa: Collected Poems, in the "Persea Series of Poetry in Translation", edited by Weissbort.[68] which was reviewed with favour by premiere literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University inThe New York Review of Books.[68]
A memorial walk was inaugurated in 2005, leading from the Devon village ofBelstone to Hughes's memorial stone above theRiver Taw, onDartmoor,[69][70] and in 2006 a Ted Hughes poetry trail was built atStover Country Park, also in Devon.[71] In 2008The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatestBritish writers since 1945".[72]
On 28 April 2011, amemorial plaque for Hughes was unveiled atNorth Tawton by his widow Carol Hughes.[46] At Lumb Bridge nearPecket Well,Calderdale is a plaque, installed by The Elmet Trust, commemorating Hughes's poem "Six Young Men", which was inspired by an old photograph of six young men taken at that spot. The photograph, taken just before theFirst World War, was of six young men who were all soon to lose their lives in the war.[73] A Ted Hughes Festival is held each year in Mytholmroyd, led by the Elmet Trust,[74] an educational body founded to support the work and legacy of Hughes.[75]
In 2010, it was announced that Hughes would be commemorated with a memorial inPoets' Corner inWestminster Abbey.[76] On 6 December 2011, a slab ofKirkstone green slate was ceremonially placed at the foot of the memorial commemoratingT. S. Eliot.[77][78] PoetSeamus Heaney and actressJuliet Stevenson gave readings at the ceremony, which was also attended by Hughes's widow Carol and daughter Frieda, and by the poetsSimon Armitage,Blake Morrison,Andrew Motion andMichael Morpurgo.[79] Motion paid tribute to Hughes as "one of the two great poets of the last half of the last century" (the other beingPhilip Larkin).[80] Hughes's memorial stone bears lines from "That Morning", a poem recollecting the epiphany of a huge shoal of salmon flashing by as he and his son Nicholas waded a stream in Alaska:[79] "So we found the end of our journey / So we stood alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light."
In October 2015, theBBC Two major documentaryTed Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes's life and work. The programme included contributions from poetsSimon Armitage andRuth Fainlight, broadcasterMelvyn Bragg, biographersElaine Feinstein andJonathan Bate, activistRobin Morgan, criticAl Alvarez, publicist Jill Barber, friend Ehor Boyanowsky, patron Elizabeth Sigmund, friend Daniel Huws, Hughes's US editor Frances McCullough, and younger cousin Vicky Watling. His daughterFrieda spoke for the first time about her father and mother.[81]
Hughes archival material is held by institutions such asEmory University andExeter University. In 2008, theBritish Library acquired a large collection comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries, and correspondence.[82] The library archive is accessible through theBritish Library website.[83]There is also a Collection Guide available grouping together all of the Hughes material at the British Library with links to material held by other institutions.[84] Inspired by Hughes'sCrow the German painterJohannes Heisig created a large painting series in black and white which was presented to the public for the first time on the occasion of Berlin Museum Long Night in August 2011 at the SEZBerlin.[85]
In 2009, theTed Hughes Award for new work in poetry was established with the permission of Carol Hughes.The Poetry Society notes "the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, and one of the greatest twentieth century poets for both children and adults".[86] Members of thePoetry Society andPoetry Book Society recommend a living UK poet who has completed the newest and most innovative work that year, "highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life". The £5,000 prize was previously funded from the annual honorarium that formerPoet LaureateCarol Ann Duffy received as Laureate from The Queen.[87]
The Ted Hughes Society, founded in 2010, publishes a peer-reviewed on-line journal, which can be downloaded by members. Its website also publishes news, and has articles on all Hughes's major works for free access. The Society staged Hughes conferences in 2010 and 2012 atPembroke College, Cambridge, and will continue to stage conferences elsewhere.
On 16 November 2013, Hughes's former hometown ofMexborough held a special performance trail, as part of its "Right Up Our Street" project, celebrating the writer's connection with the town. The free event included a two-hour ramble through Mexborough following the route of young Hughes'spaper round. Participants visited some of the important locations which influenced the poet, with the trail beginning at Hughes's former home, which is now a furniture shop.[88]
The Elmet Trust, founded in 2006, celebrates the life and work of Ted Hughes. The Trust looks after Hughes's birthplace in Mytholmroyd, which is available as a holiday let and writer's retreat. The Trust also runs Hughes-related events, including an annual Ted Hughes Festival.[89]
Many of Ted Hughes's poems have been published as limited-editionbroadsides.[107]
Poet's family to sell rare jaguar sculpture that they believe shows his pain over Sylvia Plath's death
Papers
Property of Frieda Hughes
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