Selected Poems 1957-1994

This selection of Ted Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor, Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated into Birthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.

"Ted Hughes, who died at 68, was as deserving a poet laureate as England had chosen. From the outset he showed an overwhelming vitality. He wrote or translated or edited some 40 books during his lifetime, books of verse, of translation, of essays, as well as books for children . . . Hughes as a student had taken up anthropology, not literature, and he chose to meditate his way into trancelike states of pre-consciousness before committing poems to paper. His poems, early or late, enter into the relations of living creatures; they move in close to animal consciousness . . . While inhabiting the bodies of creatures, mostly male, Hughes clambers back down the evolutionary chain. He searches deep into the riddles of language, too, those that precede any given tongue, language that reeks of the forest or even the jungle . . . Only in Selected Poems, 1957-1994 does Hughes's imagination disclose a sensitivity that the poet had lacked or been constrained from uttering over all the earlier years: knowledge of the hearts of women. Not only does the final section include a group of eight poems relating to Sylvia Plath that he would include in Birthday Letters; but Selected Poems gives us eight more that evidently plumb the soul of Assia Wevill, the woman who broke the marriage up and later committed suicide in her turn. I find these poems, notably the Assia poems, among the most remarkable work of Hughes's late years, though in their alertness to the processes of self-destruction they are of a piece with the body of his poetry. Auden said of most major poets that their work goes on changing all their lives long, and to my mind Selected Poems, 1957-1994 proves the point. Hughes in his late years articulated more and more about women, about the family and its discontents, about the harrowing and murderous dramas explored in myths like those of Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, and Racine."—Peter Davidson, The New York Times Book Review

"Whether he wrote poems about the farm, or wild birds and animals, or birthday masques for Royal occasions, Hughes had the same spontaneity of craft which came from some inner joy in the ceremonial powers of poetry."—John Bayley, The Times Literary Supplement

Contents

This selection of Ted Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor, Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated into Birthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.