Good metrical rhymed verse, if it’s to grip the imagination and stay readable, has to have, as well as those external formal features, the same dynamo of hidden musical dramatic laws as the apparently free verse. ~ Ted Hughes

Poet Ted Hughes stormy private life often overshadowed his poetry, giving him a notoriety that even the most readable and accessible of poets rarely achieve. Known primarily to modern audiences as Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes’ poetry nevertheless earned him a place as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Ted Hughes was born in 1930 in Yorkshire, in the colorfully named village of Mytholmroyd. His early life was marked by his father’s experience as one of the few soldiers to survive the British battle at Gallipoli during World War I. Despite his father’s harrowing experience, Hughes joined the Royal Air Force, then went on to Pembroke College where he studied English, archaeology, and anthropology. His readings in mythology would later influence his poetry.

In Cambridge in 1956, Hughes met American Fulbright scholar Sylvia Plath, also a poet and writer. The two married, and for awhile taught at the University of Massachusetts. They returned to England in 1959, with Hughes a published and award-winning poet, but their relationship began to suffer, and in 1963, Plath left Hughes and committed suicide.

Critics in America excoriated Hughes for his perceived role in Plath’s death, despite the fact that he abandoned his own career as a poet to publish and promote Plath’s poetry, and his decision as her literary executor to destroy parts of Plath’s diaries did him no favors.

Hughes’ situation would unfortunately continue to spiral. His second wife, Assia Gutmann Wevill, committed suicide in 1969, also killing their young daughter, Shura. A year after Wevill’s death, Hughes married again, this time to Carol Orchard, whom he would be married to unto his death.

After the turbulent and tragic 1960s, Hughes began to write poetry again, and also to write non-fiction and even children’s books. His literary reputation in Europe was not as maligned as it was in the U.S., where he was always associated with the suicides of his first two wives, Plath in particular, and Hughes received many awards in Europe, eventually being appointed England’s Poet Laureate. He died of cancer in 1998 in his native England, still the country’s Poet Laureate.

Poems by Ted Hughes:

Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assasin\'s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon\'s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other\'s face

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment\'s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock\'s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox\'s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Crow’s Fall

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun\'s centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened-
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

\"Up there,\" he managed,
\"Where white is black and black is white, I won.\"
