Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was an eminent English poet who led a resurgence of English poetic innovation starting in the late 1950s. He was named poet laureate in 1985. Ted Hughes was born in 1930 in the Yorkshire town of Mytholmroyd in England. His home...

Ted Hughes is one of a very few contemporary British poets to have gained a significant reputation outside Britain. Of poets near him in age only Thom Gunn and, in more recent years, Geoffrey Hill have quickened as much critical interest in the...

Ted Hughes's poetry for adults has made him one of the most important British writers in the second half of the twentieth century. When his work first appeared in the late 1950s, it struck many readers as a bold departure from the urbane and...

WHEN SIR John Betjeman died in 1984, it was widely felt that his obvious successor as Poet Laureate would be Philip Larkin. Larkin, however, made it abundantly clear that he would refuse the position, and the availability of Ted Hughes seemed at the time...

Given all the hoo-hah surrounding Prince Charles's decision to allow a granite stone memorial to be placed in a secret and remote spot on Dartmoor in memory of his friend the poet Ted Hughes, I expected to encounter something along the lines of Cleopatra's...

Diane Middlebrook, a leading feminist scholar who wrote acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, died Saturday. She was 68.Middlebrook, who helped launch feminist studies at Stanford University, where she taught literature for 35 years, died of cancer in San Francisco, according to...

Little Fugue, by Robert Anderson. Ballantine, 384 pages, $24.95. Edgar Allan Poe wrote that the death of a beautiful woman "is the most poetical topic in the world." There could hardly be a less wholesome assertion in American criticism (unless it's Camille Paglia's assertion that...

[In the following essay, Haberstroh analyzes the changing landscape in Hughes's Remains of Elmet, and traces the historical forces which bring about the change.]

[In the following essay, Holbrook traces some of Hughes's theories about Shakespeare and strongly disagrees with the poet's interpretation.]

[In the following interview, Hughes shares personal revelations about his relationship with Sylvia Plath.]

In his poem "Thistles," Ted Hughes argues that the world will never live in peace, that wars will always emerge through memories in the way that thistles spring back through seeds. Hughes uses well-fitted, pessimistic diction; expressive similes, metaphors, and other language techniques; and sound devices, syntax, and rhythm to express his view.