Jonathan Bate.
JONATHAN BATE: TED HUGHES BIOGRAPHY
tED HUGHES: THE UNAUTHORISED LIFE (2015)
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Ted Hughes (born 1930) was an English poet, children’s author, and translator, who is widely regarded as one of th 20th century;s greatest poets. He was made Poet Laureate in 1984, holding the post until he died in 2008. In 1956 he married the poet Sylvia Plath. They had two children, spending their stressful life together in the USA and England. They separated in 1962, and Sylvia took her own life the next year.
Ted Hughes was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father was an Irish carpenter who had fought in the First World War. narrowly escaped death when a bullet lodged in the pay book in his breast pocket, and went on to run with his wife a newsagents and tobacconist’s shop. Ted Hughes’ secondary school teachers encouraged him to write and he became convinced as a schoolchild that his vocation was to be a poet. He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, and chose to do his National Service before university. After university he pursued a career as a writer, earning his living in a variety of jobs including a nightwatchman, a rose gardener, and working at the London Zoo as a washer-upper - something that enabled him to observe animals at close quarters.
The Sunday Times wrote of the book: ‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’.
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Sir Jonathan Bate (born 1958) is a British academic, writer and broadcaster who holds appointments at Arizona State University and at Worcester College, Oxford, where he is Prsofessor of English Literature and was Provost of the college from 2017 to 2019. He took his degree in English at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, returning to the college to undertake his PhD on ‘Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination’. He also spent a year at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow. His several books include a prize-winning biography of the poet John Clare.
