Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet

by ElaineFeinstein (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  Ted Hughes is one of the greatest English poets of this century. He was a natural countryman who had a sharp eye for the natural world, a dislike of technology and a fascination with primitive cultures. But it is for his marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath that he is best known. Their seven-year marriage marked his whole life and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than 30 years. Birthday Letters, a sequence of lyrics cast as a continued conversation with Plath, shows how electric their relationship was and how much damage they did to one another. In this biography Feinstein argues that they were both flawed geniuses and that the truth about the failure of their marriage must incorporate her fragility and his recklessness. Many people, including his friend Al Alvarez, have held Hughes's adultery responsible for Plath's death: it was her discovery of his affair with Assia Wevill that led her to order Hughes out of their Devon home. He later had a child with Assia and she also killed herself along with their young daughter. Elaine Feinstein first met Hughes in 1969, the year of Assia's suicide. She was a good friend of his and his sister Olwen's, both of whom guarded the Plath estate. She knows many of the European and America poets who so influenced Hughes - Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Miroslav Holub - and knows the world in which both he and Plath moved. This is the first biography of Hughes since his death in 1999 and Feinstein has had access to the main archive of Hughes' mss at Emory University, Atlanta, as well as archives at the University of Liverpool and many letters in private hands.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.25

  Ted Hughes is one of the greatest English poets of this century, yet his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than 30 years. Many people, including his friend Al Alvarez, have held Hughes's adultery responsible for Plath's death. Elaine Feinstein first met Hughes in 1969, and she was a good friend of his and his sister Olwen's, both of whom guarded the Plath estate. She knows many of the European and America poets who so influenced Hughes - Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Miroslav Holub, and knows the world in which both he and Plath moved.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  Although Ted Hughes's genius was recognized early and he ended his days as England's Poet Laureate, his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life, and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963. Many people have held his adultery responsible for Plath's death; in this insightful book, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, and throws a sad new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their young daughter.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with childhood friends, fellow undergraduates, poets, and critics, Feinstein gives a portrait of a large-spirited, magnetic personality intrigued by the forms of magical experience that preoccupied Shakespeare and Yeats, but who was nevertheless a down-to-earth Yorkshire man, whose poetic vision encompassed not only his love of the natural world but also all the evidence of human brutality in the past century.