Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer who served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death in 1998. He was born Edward James Hughes on August 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, and he died on October 28, 1998, in North Tawton, Devon. He grew up in the Calder Valley and later in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, and the moorland landscape of his childhood became one of the controlling images of his work.

His education at Pembroke College, Cambridge — where he initially read English before switching to archaeology and anthropology — shaped his interest in myth and folklore. His first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 after winning a competition judged by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore. Subsequent volumes including Lupercal (1960), Wodwo (1967), and Crow (1970) established him as one of the leading English-language poets of his generation, with a verse marked by violent natural imagery and a stripped, consonantal style.

His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath, whom he met in Cambridge in 1956, ended with her separation from him in 1962 and her suicide in February 1963. He inherited her literary estate and edited her posthumous collections, including Ariel in 1965, decisions that were contested for the rest of his life. The poet Assia Wevill, with whom he had been involved, also died by suicide in 1969, killing their young daughter Shura.

His later books included translations of Aeschylus and Ovid, the children's classic The Iron Man (1968), and Birthday Letters (1998), a volume of poems addressed to Plath that he published months before his death from cancer. Birthday Letters won the Forward, T. S. Eliot, and Whitbread prizes, and the Whitbread Book of the Year, an unprecedented sweep for a single collection.

His name Ted is an English short form of Edward, from the Old English Ēadweard meaning "rich guard" or "prosperous protector." He was registered as Edward but was known as Ted from childhood, and he used the short form on the title page of every book he published.