Ted Hughes Summary

Everything you need to understand or teach Ted Hughes.

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3 Biography
1 Student Essay
26 Literature Criticism
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Study Pack

The Ted Hughes Study Pack contains about 210 pages of study material in 30 products, including:

Biography (3)

Ted Hughes

1,247 words, approx. 5 pages

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 Y... Read more

Ted Hughes

8,465 words, approx. 29 pages

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 ha... Read more

Ted Hughes

6,523 words, approx. 22 pages

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 reader... Read more

Essays & Analysis (27)

Critical Essay by A. E. Dyson

1,026 words, approx. 4 pages

Critical Essay by A. E. Dyson [The Hawk In The Rain] is, to my mind, the most distinguished volume of verse by a poet of Mr. Hughes's generation to have appeared, and it notably escapes the var... Read more

Critical Essay by Derwent May

1,809 words, approx. 7 pages

Critical Essay by Derwent May [When The Hawk in the Rain was published] it was evident that there was a gifted new poet on the scene who was prepared to make strong, confident assertions about the imp... Read more

Critical Essay by Mary Kinzie

244 words, approx. 1 pages

Critical Essay by Mary Kinzie No patently sexual or scatological motifs are present in Ted Hughes's book, Moon-Whales, but the poems here suffer … from trying to be cutely hard-headed&#x... Read more

Critical Essay by John Mole

276 words, approx. 1 pages

Critical Essay by John Mole Moon-Bells and Other Poems [published in the United States as Moon-Whales and Other Poems] is, in a very real sense, a young person's guide to Ted Hughes. It does no... Read more

Critical Essay by Christopher Reid

529 words, approx. 2 pages

Critical Essay by Christopher Reid After [his] youthful, somewhat amateur-carpenter exercises in stanza-form, [Hughes] has abandoned this in his later work for a narrative mode that is largely his own... Read more

Critical Essay by Craig Raine

278 words, approx. 1 pages

Critical Essay by Craig Raine Ted Hughes is the least academic of poets, totally unfazed by the unpoetical nature of the age. In Gaudete, whatever its structural obscurities, his confident, unselfcons... Read more

Critical Essay by Martin Booth

513 words, approx. 2 pages

Critical Essay by Martin Booth The importance and validity of place to the English poet has long been of prime importance…. For Ted Hughes, not surprisingly, it is the West Riding of Yorkshire,... Read more

Ted Hughes

2,074 words, approx. 7 pages

[In the following obituary, Lyall discusses Hughes's life and death from cancer at the age of 68.] Ted Hughes, the British poet who was known as much for his doomed marriage to the American poe... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,060 words, approx. 4 pages

[In the following obituary, Miller discusses Hughes's career and life upon his death from cancer.] British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whose failed marriage to the tortured American poet Sylvia P... Read more

Ted Hughes

4,914 words, approx. 17 pages

[In the following interview, Hughes shares personal revelations about his relationship with Sylvia Plath.] Just when every literary critic and Sylvia Plath devotee thought that they had sorted out the... Read more

Ted Hughes

525 words, approx. 2 pages

[In the following review of The Hawk in the Rain, Merwin praises Hughes's young talent for its originality and intelligence.] Ted Hughes is a young English poet; The Hawk in the Rain is his fir... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,449 words, approx. 5 pages

[Hoffman is a poet and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following review, he analyzes Hughes's Crow, calling it "a new version of the gospel."] �... Read more

Ted Hughes

344 words, approx. 2 pages

[In the following review, Holkeboer lauds Hughes's Gaudete.] Praise for Hughes has been grudging for some reason. Called the finest poet of his generation (the competition scarcely threatens th... Read more

Ted Hughes

2,299 words, approx. 8 pages

[In the following essay, Witte discusses the mythological influences on Hughes's Crow.] Ted Hughes has collected in Crow what appear to be the fragments of apocalyptic experience. Everything in... Read more

Ted Hughes

4,199 words, approx. 14 pages

Critical Essay by Donald F. McKaySOURCH: "Animal Music: Ted Hughes's Progress in Speech and Song," in English in Studies in Canada, Vol. VII, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 81-92. [In t... Read more

Ted Hughes

3,083 words, approx. 11 pages

[In the following review, Moynahan analyzes the quality and nature of Hughes's poetry since Crow.] Among the moderns, Ted Hughes has aspired to go farther than any other in following up on the ... Read more

Ted Hughes

6,640 words, approx. 23 pages

[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 Remains of Elmet, a volume o... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,120 words, approx. 4 pages

[In the following essay, Roberts discusses Hughes's appointment as England's Poet Laureate.] The reported expectation of the 'literary world' that the laureateship would be... Read more

Ted Hughes

4,919 words, approx. 17 pages

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

Ted Hughes

2,561 words, approx. 9 pages

[In the following essay, Brandes asserts that Hughes's poetry remains out of time and history.] In 1957, at the outset of his career, Ted Hughes asserted that his poems exist because "th... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,014 words, approx. 4 pages

[In the following review, Firchow gives reserved praise for the poems in Hughes's Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems.] Since succeeding to the office of Poet Laureate in 1984, Te... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,256 words, approx. 5 pages

[In the following review, Levi discusses the craziness in Hughes's collection of essays, Winter Pollen.] There are nearly all the essential pieces of an autobiography of this most surprising an... Read more

Ted Hughes

981 words, approx. 4 pages

[In the following review, Roberts discusses the suffering and death in Hughes's poetry from New Selected Poems, 1957–1994.] Woody Allen once said that nature was one big restaurant. Push... Read more

Ted Hughes

1,016 words, approx. 4 pages

[In the following review, Firchow discusses Hughes's choice of selection in his New Selected Poems.] It is beginning to look as if Ted Hughes wants to make a habit of selecting his poems. His f... Read more

Ted Hughes

762 words, approx. 3 pages

[In the following review, Levi lauds Hughes's translations of Ovid's poetry.] It must be 100 years since Maurice Baring remembered in print how an Eton master, enquiring what class he wa... Read more

Ted Hughes

863 words, approx. 3 pages

[In the following review, McGough complains that Hughes's By Heart lacks a contemporary feel.] The only poetry that mattered to me when I was at school was the stuff that we recited in class, a... Read more

Language, Sound, and Literary Choices in "Thistles"

881 words, approx. 3 pages

Will there ever be a time where the world will live in peace, stripped from all wars and grudges? Ted Hughes partially answers this question through his self-written, extremely evocative poem - `Thist... Read more

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Why are couplets used in To Paint a Water Lily?

-- The couplets are used to reinforce the motif of 'two' or a 'couple', or the 'duality' of things.... read more

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