Hughes, Ted (1930-1998), was an English poet known for his violent and symbolic nature poems. Hughes served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death in 1998.
Hughes’s first collection of poetry, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), portrays in powerful and descriptive language the beauty and brutality Hughes saw in nature. Hughes’s reputation increased after he published a long cycle of lyrics dominated by a menacing bird called Crow. The bird is a composite symbol taken from several mythical and religious traditions. The Crow poems were published in five volumes in 1970 and 1971. The best-known work in the cycle is Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970). Hughes continued his mythical themes in Cave Birds (1975). Hughes’s later nature poems, beginning with Moortown (1980), carry a note of hope and affirmation absent from his earlier work.
Edward James Hughes was born on Aug. 16, 1930, in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire. The birds and other animals Hughes observed on the moors near his home strongly influenced the content and imagery of his poetry. Hughes was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her suicide in 1963. He wrote about their relationship in a collection of 88 poems called Birthday Letters (1998). The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes (2004) and Collected Poems for Children (2007) were published after Hughes died on Oct. 28, 1998.
See also Plath, Sylvia.
