British Poet Ted Hughes - Five Things You May Not Know

While British poet Ted Hughes was as prolific a poet as they come, the sheer fact that he was a poet means you probably know little about him, if you've heard of him at all. So, as an introduction to this fine writer, here are a few interesting facts you may or may not know about the poet Ted Hughes. For those of you who have had the pleasure of reading his work already, this will be a nice supplement to current knowledge.

1. He wrote "The Iron Giant." That's right, the inspirational, adult-friendly animated feature (featuring the voices of Jennifer Aniston and Vin Diesel, among others) is loosely based on a children's book written by Hughes called "The Iron Man," published in 1968. The story, an account of a little boy who makes friends with an innocent giant robot from outer space, initially began as a bedtime story Hughes told to his children (Feinstein 175). In 2003, local schoolchildren in Mytholmroyd, the town in West Yorkshire, England where Hughes was born, illustrated different chapters of the book and put them onto "weatherproof and vandal resistant boards" affixed to platforms at the local railway station. The story and pictures of the boards can be seen here.

2. He was married to Sylvia Plath. Okay, so you probably already know that Ted Hughes's first wife was the now infamous American poet Sylvia Plath, and you may even know that her 1963 suicide by gas was likely driven by Hughes's own infidelity (the suspicion of which drove her to, among other things, make a bonfire of all the papers in Hughes study and watch as they burned (Feinstein 126-127). What you may not know is that the 1980 publication of Plath's collected poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was assembled and edited by Hughes himself. Hughes, who was married to Plath for roughly six years, was easily the best person for the job. Not only was he intimately acquainted with her work and style, but he had access to obscure and unpublished pieces that without his guidance may have been lost. As he writes in the introduction to Plath's The Collected Poems, "This book contains not merely what verse she saved, but - after 1956 - all she wrote."

3. He had two lovers who killed themselves. Sylvia Plath was the first, but not the last of Hughes's women to stick their head in a gas oven and breathe in. Assia Wevill, the woman who most aroused Plath's suspicions of Hughes's infidelity (with good reason) and caused their initial separation, killed herself and the couple's daughter Shura after ingesting sleeping pills and lying down next to a stove with the gas turned on. Hughes had been carrying on at least two affairs at this time (one with a married friend, Brenda Hedden, and another with Carol Orchard, the daughter of another friend), and the probable knowledge of this infidelity mixed with an already profound depression likely drove Wevill over the edge. Wevill also felt that Hughes blamed her for Plath's death, calling her "the dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia" (Feinstien 166). An article from the British Telegraph accusing Hughes of being an alleged "domestic tyrant who laid down the law" can be found here. The article also claims that Wevill was "almost certainly unknown to Plath."

4. He was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. As British Poet Laureate Hughes believed that "there was a close connection between the role of poet and the symbolic place of royalty in society" (Feinstein 217). He fulfilled his role by writing poetry in response to occasions as necessitated by the royal family, such as "Two Poems for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on Her Eighty-fifth Birthday" and "The Song of the Honey Bee: For the Marriage of His Royal Highness Prince Andrew and Miss Sarah Ferguson." These poems were collected and published as the heavily symbolic Rain-Charm for the Duchy and other Laureate Poems in 1992.

5. He was portrayed in film by Daniel Craig. In 2003, a pre-Bond Daniel Craig indeed played Hughes in the Sylvia Plath biopic "Sylvia." According to the movie's page on imdb.com, in the film when Craig (as Ted) says, "It reminds me of my days in Mytholmroyd," he doesn't pronounce the name of the town correctly, saying "MITH-um-royd" instead of "MY-thum-royd." The movie sported a strong cast (including Gwyneth Paltrow as the lead) and earned itself an "A-" critics average on entertainmentweekly.com.

Sources:

Feinstein, Elaine. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 200l.

Hughes, Ted. Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. 1981. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.