Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
English poet. Hughes studied at Cambridge and started publishing his poems in literary journals.
In 1956, he met and soon married the American poet Sylvia Plath. In 1957, Hughes published his first poems in The Hawk in the Rain. Hughes poetry is characterised by the presence of the animal world. His most famous subject is the "crow", seen as an amalgam of god, bird and man.
The Hugheses spent a year teaching at Amherst and Smith Colleges. They returned to England in 1959 in order to dedicate their full-time energies to writing. They separated in 1962. The following year, Sylvia Plath committed suicide.
After three years of non activity, Hughes began writing again. He wrote many volumes for children and in Remains of Elmet (1979) he recalled his own childhood.
From 1965 he was co-editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Some of Hughes's essays on subjects of literary and cultural criticism were published as Winter Pollen (1994).
In 1984, he was appointed Poet Laureate. After thirty-five years of silence on the subject of his marriage to Sylvia Plath, Hughes published Birthday Letters (1998), a controversial and crucial work. In 1998, he received the Whitbread Prize and died in October of the same year.
Among his other works are Wolfwatching (1990), Flowers and Insects (1986), River (1984), Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982), Moortown (1980), Cave Birds (1979), Gaudette (1977), Crow (1971), and Lupercal (1960).