Ted Hughes is one of the greatest English poets of the twentieth century, for whom recognition came early and who was unusually successful in the difficult role of poet laureate. Yet his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His mar-riage to Sylvia Plath marked his entire life, and he never completely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than thirty years. Hughes's best-selling book, Birthday Letters, a sequence of lyrics cast as a continued conversation with Plath, shows how electric their relationship was and how much damage they did to each other.
In this biography Elaine Feinstein tells for the first time the story of Hughes's life as he experienced it, rather than presenting him as a figure in the perception of others. Many people have held his adultery responsible for Plath's death, since it was her discovery of his affair with the glamorous Assia Wevill that led her to order Hughes out of their Devon home. Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, which includes Platte's fragility throughout the marriage, and Hughes's own confused intentions in the last few weeks of her life. In the process, Feinstein throws new light on his relationship with Wevill, in some ways as vulnerable a figure as Platte herself. Hughes later had a child with Wevill, who killed herself and their young daughter.
Drawing on extensive archive material and her own revealing analysis of Hughes's poems, as well as inter-views with childhood friends, fellow undergraduates, poets, and critics, Feinstein, who knew Hughes for nearly thirty years, gives a complex portrait of a poet intrigued by the forms of magical experience that pre-occupied Shakespearean d Yeats, who was nevertheless a down-to-earth Yorkshire man. His sharp eye for the nat-ural world and his love of the countryside are widely known, but equally important to his development was the work of poets from eastern and central Europe such as Miroslav Holub, Vasco Popa, and Janos Pilinszky. His vision of life was marked by the evidence of human bru-tality in the twentieth century.
Contains 12 pages of b/w photographs.
