Poetic Prize Winners: Ted Hughes Part I

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Nov 23, 2001

The sudden death of Ted Hughes in October of 1998 was reported widely throughout the international media. He was the Poet Laureate,and recognized as one of the most influential poets to emerge since World War II. Ted Hughes never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he did win enough Literary Prizes to the extent that they are too numerous to mention here. His poetic range was rich and varied, he wrote verse for adults and he wrote award winning books for children.

Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire. He actually began to write poetry at age seven. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, but instead of reading English, he took up archeology and anthropology. The man who would become England's greatest poet had also worked as a gardener, a zoo-keeper and a night-watchman. Animals populated most of his poetry. His very first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain won the First Publication Award, which was judged by eminent poets such as W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender.

In 1963 Hughes became famous for all the wrong reasons with the death of his wife, the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath. For in her death Plath was to become a feminist heroine, a poetic legend in the growing controversy on the examination of the female experience. Ted Hughes remained rigorously and intensely silent over the tragedy to the extent that the media began to point fingers. He was the executor of her works, and the world wanted to know what went wrong. His own poetry, centered largely in images of nature and myth did not provide any insight into the matter. He was, after all, a poet of the highest order. With the publication of Birthday Letters, however, a year before his own death, Ted Hughes brought his readers into his private life. A total of 197 poems, many serialized in the Times, were to rock the public perception of their relationship. The poems are a touching remembrance, and a glowing testament to the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath.

The poems also reveal Plath's inner demons. Mental illness is more understood these days,although nothing is preventable. If Plath were a poet today,however, she would find a more civilized and medically advanced world ready to deal with mental inbalance.

Birthday Letters revealed Hughes; upfront and personal. It is important to emphasize that these were complete, great works of poetry which could stand on their own despite the public interest in their personal lives. Birthday Letters won both the Forward Prize for Poetry, and the hefty T.S. Eliot Prize. They are polished, linguistic, technical masterpieces set to 'invoke' and 'communicate' to his former wife. Who other than England's greatest poet then, was better fitted to use poetry to get at the truth, and illuminate the difficult and greatly gifted artist Sylvia Plath. Great poems remind us that poetry is not the stuff of entertainment or diversion, what poetry really aims for are the essential truths.

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