Letters of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes (1930-98) was one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry. His vast and multifaceted output, which challenged and stimulated generations of readers is now a permanent monument. His voice, once heard, is unforgettable. But Hughes was also a prolific letter-writer, with a private voice no less original and compelling. He described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and the Letters offers a selection from the thousands he wrote over a period of fifty years. Hughes's dedication to poetry is plain from the outset, whether he is addressing members of his Yorkshire family or those Cambridge University friends who were to become lifelong correspondents. As his own achievement as a writer grows, so does the extent of his acquaintance, and it is possible to see how intensely this most private of individuals was attuned, not just to his own preoccupations, but to other lives and to the theatre of events in the wider world. Reports on works in progress - Lupercal , Wodwo , Crow , Moortown , Gaudete , River , Remains of Elmet and Birthday Letters - together with metaphysical speculation, social comment (his remarks on England and the English are particularly telling) and advice to friends and strangers are all issue copiously. Accounts of fishing expeditions sit side by side with intimate disclosures, comic improvisation, or passages of medieval wisdom. This selection includes correspondence from Hughes's marriage to Sylvia Plath, and his letters to those he trusted reveal much about his feelings for her. There are letters, too, to Assia Wevill, who was the mother of his third child and who, like Plath, killed herself. Beyond that, the Letters offers a detailed picture of a visionary, questing and prodigiously creative individual - responding in full tilt to the challenges of an incomparably eventful life and career.