AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF TED HUGHES

Ted Hughes

Homage to Ted Hughes,painting by Reginald Gray , 2004, Bankfield Museum, Yorkshire

Ted Hughes OBE (born August 17, 1930 as Edward James Hughes in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire , England , † October 28, 1998 in London ) was an English poet and writer .

Table of Contents

·         1life and work

·         2important works

·         3literature

·         4web links

·         5individual proofs

Life and work

Hughes' birthplace in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire

Ted Hughes grew up in Mexborough , a city in South Yorkshire . After graduating from the school, he served for two years as a radio mechanic in the Royal Air Force until he finally began his studies first English literature, then archeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge , which he successfully completed in 1954. He founded the literary journal St Botolph's Review with some friends . At a student party he met the then unknown writer Sylvia Plath, Already her first meeting pointed to the coming turbulent love relationship of the two (Sylvia should have bitten Ted in the cheek). They married in June 1956 and had two children with each other, Frieda Rebecca (1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962-2009, suicide ^[1] ) after a miscarriage in February 1961.

After graduating, Hughes worked for some years as a gardener, zookeeper, night watchman and editor of a film studio, before he published his first poetry book The Hawk in the Rain in 1957 , with which he gained international prestige. Hughes already prefers the form of the animal poem with a wide span between the individual poems. For example, in The Horses he tries to capture the essence of the animals, while in The Thought Foxrelates the process of creation of the poem to the path of the fox through a snowy landscape. This poem marks the beginning of a creative sensitivity that allows Hughes to effortlessly include horses and hawks, trout and salmon, mosquitoes and swifts, even potted flowers and thistles in his lyrical work, without giving them their "aloofness" or creaturely peculiarity to take. Instead, Hughes in his animal poetry in about The Jaguar or The Bull Moses strives to make it clear that the animal remains even in the cage behind lock and bolt a "release.

In 1957, he moved to Massachusetts with Sylvia Plath , where he temporarily taught English and creative writing at the university there. In December 1959, both returned to London and eventually moved to rural Devon . In 1960, Hughes published his second book of poems under the title Lupercal, in which he strives to destroy all forms of a romanticized, sentimental lyric, in order to characterize in a strong way the behavior of humans towards the animals. ^[2]

Sylvia Plath suffered at that time for years for severe depression and accused her husband Ted initially wrongly and finally rightly to be unfaithful to her. He started a relationship with Assia Wevill . Sylvia Plath's suicide on February 11, 1963 in London hit him hard, but also brought him charges, especially from the growing ranks of Plath's followers. ^[3] His own writing came in the following years in the background, he dealt mainly with Sylvia Plath's literary estate. In 1967, his collection Wodwo with poems and short stories, whose title from the Ritter romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knighttaken from and corresponds to the importance of a forest spirit. Hughes's studies in mythology , ethnology, and the occultsciences as well as his reading of Robert Graves 's The White Goddess (1948, dt .: The White Goddess ) are particularly reflected in this volume . ^[4]

Another major stroke of fate befell him in 1969, when Assia Wevill also took her own life, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura.

Hughes published after his first works more significant volumes of poetry and children's books. His 1970 first published poetry cycle Crow. It also includes the poem Crow's First Lesson , is one of the most significant works of 20th-century English poetry and represents Hughes's most ambitious attempt, with a large-scale new myth creation in the Crowpoems to invalidate and disprove the traditional Christian conception of God's love through a mythical counterpart, to express the actual reality of modernity with its destructive powers in an appropriate modern poetic form. Crow is oneTricksterfigur , which is at the same time God, adversary of God, demon and animal in one. In his brutality, Crow recalls literary figures such as Shakespeare's King Lear or Seneca's tragedy Oedipus, which Hughes had previously edited. If this collection of poems first resembles an anti- theodicy , then only towards the end will a fundamental confidence in the power of life be felt. ^[5]

In the book Gaudette , published in 1977, Hughes intermingles prose and poetry and chooses a narrative framework. It is narrated by the Anglican pastor Nicholas Lumb, who is abducted by ghosts and exchanged by a doppelganger. Later, Lumb reappears as a wanderer through West Ireland and sings songs in honor of the Mother Goddess in the epilogue . In Cave Birds Hughes processed again in 1975 mystical elements, while in 1979 in Remains of Elmet is based on photographs by Fay Godwin, who try to capture the landscapes in Yorkshire. In the volumes Moortown(1979) and River (1983), Hughes thematically focuses on the regenerating power of nature as a permanent element. In Moortown , he portrays everyday experiences at his father-in-law's farm from his second marriage to Carol Orchard; in River , he creates the appearance of a river from a variety of perspectives, once again demonstrating the breadth of his lyrical creativity. ^[6]

The children's book "The Iron Man" was based in 1989 for a rock musical of the same name by Pete Townshend and was filmed in 1999 by Brad Bird as a cartoon entitled " The Giant from Space " (The Iron Giant) . Among other awards, the film was awarded the prestigious BAFTA Award for Best Children's Film of the Year. He was also active as a translator, u. a. from works by Frank Wedekind and Federico García Lorca . From 1984 until his death, Ted Hughes was the so-called poet laureate , the national poet appointed by the British Queen. His successor in this position was Andrew Motion,

His last work Birthday Letters was published a few months before his death and can be understood as a work-up of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. It became a bestseller and won several awards. Shortly before his death, Hughes was inducted into the prestigious Order of Merit (OM) by Queen Elizabeth II , whose regular membership is limited to only 24 people. In the same year he was awarded the TS Eliot Prize . On October 28, 1998, Edward James Hughes died of a heart attack at the age of 68 after suffering from cancer . The memorial service for him took place in North Tawton, whereupon he was in Exeterwas cremated. His ashes were scattered in Dartmoor .

2003 saw the film Sylvia starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig in the lead roles. The film covers the relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath from their first meeting to the suicide of Sylvia. In her 2015 novel Jij zegt het (German: You Say It, 2016), Dutch writer Connie Palmen describes the relationship with Sylvia Plath from the perspective of Ted Hughes. ^[7]

During his lifetime, Hughes faced numerous criticisms or even hostility; In addition to being complicit in his wife's suicide, he was accused of primitivism, poetry of violence, thematic narrowness, anti-rationalism and mytho-poetic condensation. Posthumously , however, Hughes was almost unanimously declared one of the most prominent poet personalities of the second half of the 20th century by literary critics. ^[8th]

Important Works 

·         The Hawk in the Rain. (1957)

·         Lupercal. (1960)

·         Wodwo. (1967)

·         Poetry in the Making. (Essays on writing) (1967)

·         Crow. From the Life and the Songs of the Crow. (1970)

·         Crow's First Lesson . (1970)

·         Gaudete. (1977)

·         Cave Birds. (1978)

·         Remains of Elmet. (1979)

·         Moortown. (1979)

·         River. (1983)

·         Flowers and insects. (1986)

·         Wolf watching. (1989)

·         Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. (Study on Shakespeare) (1992)

·         Winter pollen. Occasional Prose. (Essays) (1994)

·         Difficulties of a Bridegroom. (Short stories) (1995)

·         Birthday Letters. (1998)

For children:

·         How the Whale Became.

·         The Iron Man.

·         The Iron Woman.

·         Tales of the Early World.

·         The Dreamfighter and other Creation Tales.

·         Moon Whales. (Poems)

·         Season songs. (Poems)

·         What is the Truth. (Poems)

·         The Cat and the Cuckoo. (Poems)

·         The Mermaid's Purse. (Poems)

German translations:

·         Ted Hughes: Crow: From the life and songs of the crow. (Translated by Elmar Schenkel )

·         Ted Hughes: Poems. (Translated by Ulrich Horstmann)

·         Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters. (Translated by Andrea Paluch and Robert Habeck )

·         Ted Hughes: The tiger does not kill. (Translated by Jutta and Wolfgang Kaußen)

·         Ted Hughes: How Poetry Arises. (Essays, about: v. Jutta Kaußen , Wolfgang Kaußen and Claas Kazzer)

·         Ted Hughes: Prometheus on his rock. Island Library 1230 (translated by Jutta Kaußen)

·         Ted Hughes: Something has to stay. (Translated by Jutta and Wolfgang Kaußen)

For children:

·         Ted Hughes: The Iron Man. (Translated by U.-M. Gutzschhahn)

·         Ted Hughes: How the whale was created and other stories. (Translated by Karin Polz)

·         Ted Hughes: The snout and other stories from the beginning of the world. (Translated by U.-M. Gutzschhahn)

Settings of Ted Hughes' poems:

·         Paul Crabtree: Songs at Year's End. Four songs after poems by Ted Hughes. For a five-part mixed choir a cappella. Berlin 2006. (There was a Day; The Seven Sorrows; Snow and Snow; The Warm and the Cold)

Literature 

·         Elaine Feinstein : Ted Hughes. The life of a poet. Norton, New York, NY a. 2003, ISBN 0-393-32362-5 .

·         Neil Roberts : Ted Hughes. A literary life. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-1-4039-3605-9 .

·         Diane Middlebrook : You wanted your stars - Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Biography. Edition Fünf, Gräfelfing, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-942374-32-3 .

·         Jonathan Bate : Ted Hughes. The unauthorized life. William Collins, London 2015, ISBN 978-0-811824-2 .

·         Connie Palmen : You say it. Roman, from the Dutch by Hanni Ehlers. Diogenes, Zurich 2016, ISBN 978-3-257-06974-7 ( alias Jij zegt het, 2015).