Ted Hughes

Edward James Hughes, OM (1930-08-17 – 1998-10-28) was an English poet, translator and children's writer who for the last 14 years of his life occupied the role of Poet Laureate. His first wife was Sylvia Plath.

Sourced

• 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.
  • "The Thought-Fox", line 10, from The Hawk in the Rain (1957).

• With a 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.
  • "The Thought-Fox", line 21.

Lupercal (1960)

• Pike, three inches long, perfect
  Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
  Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
  • "Pike", line 1.

• The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
  Not to be changed at this date;
  A life subdued to its instrument.
  • "Pike", line 13.

• Stilled legendary depth:
  It was as deep as England. It held
  Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
  That past nightfall I dared not cast.
  • "Pike", line 33.

• I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
  Inaction, no falsifying dream
  Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
  Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
  • "Hawk Roosting", line 1.

• It took the whole of Creation
  To produce my foot, my each feather:
  Now I hold Creation in my foot.
  Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
  I kill where I please because it is all mine.
  There is no sophistry in my body:
  My manners are tearing off heads –
  The allotment of death.
  • "Hawk Roosting", line 10.

The Iron Man (1968)

The Iron Man : A Children's Story in Five Nights; also published as The Iron Giant : A Story in Five Nights

• The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.
  • Ch. 1 : The Coming of the Iron Man

• He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff. And his right foot, his enormous iron right foot, lifted-up, out, into space, and the Iron Man stepped forward, off the cliff, into nothingness.
  • Ch. 1 : The Coming of the Iron Man

• Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen.
  Night passed.
  • Ch. 1 : The Coming of the Iron Man

Quotes about Hughes

• No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken.
  • Seamus Heaney, speaking at Hughes' funeral. [1]

• Hughes began (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957; Lupercal, 1960) as an elemental poet of power; he was inchoate, but fruitfully aware both of the brute force of creation and of the natural world. Then…he began to assume a mantic role; he has now turned into (Crow, 1970) a pretentious, coffee-table poet, a mindless celebrant of instinct.
  • Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature ([1973] 1975) vol. 1, p. 358.

• The sky split apart in malice
  Stars rattled like pans on a shelf
  Crow shat on Buckingham Palace
  God pissed Himself.
  • Philip Larkin, letter to Charles Monteith, March 2, 1978; published in Anthony Thwaite (ed.) Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) p. 581.
  • A parody of Hughes commemorating the Queen's Silver Jubilee.