[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.]

SOURCH: "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 the following essay, McKay discusses Hughes's use of and emphasis on language in Crow and Gaudete.]

[In the following review, Moynahan analyzes the quality and nature of Hughes's poetry since Crow.]

[In the following essay, Brandes asserts that Hughes's poetry remains out of time and history.]

[In the following essay, Witte discusses the mythological influences on Hughes's Crow.]

[In the following obituary, Lyall discusses Hughes's life and death from cancer at the age of 68.]

[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 importance of strong—even confused or blind—feeling. And not only assertions; for the poems were often simply like assaults, designed to provoke the reader into vigorous—and in this poet's view, it seemed, perfectly healthy—responses of scarcely rational dismay or anger. Lupercal was the title of Hughes...

[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."]

[In the following review, Levi discusses the craziness in Hughes's collection of essays, Winter Pollen.]

[In the following essay, Roberts discusses Hughes's appointment as England's Poet Laureate.]

[In the following obituary, Miller discusses Hughes's career and life upon his death from cancer.]

[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 various poetic labels that the last ten years have thrown up…. The major theme in the poems is power; and power thought of not morally, or in time, but absolutely—in a present which is often violent and self-destructive, but isolated from motive or consequence, and so unmodified by the irony which time confers. For Ted Hughes pow...

[In the following review, Firchow discusses Hughes's choice of selection in his New Selected Poems.]

[In the following review, Firchow gives reserved praise for the poems in Hughes's Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems.]

[In the following review, Roberts discusses the suffering and death in Hughes's poetry from New Selected Poems, 1957–1994.]

[In the following review, McGough complains that Hughes's By Heart lacks a contemporary feel.]

[In the following review, Levi lauds Hughes's translations of Ovid's poetry.]

[In the following excerpt, Logan questions what has happened to Hughes's style in Wolfwatching.]

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 invention—characterised by a disdain for rhyme, lines of ad hoc length, a jerky movement from incident to incident, etc. At times Hughes seems to be going for a primeval effect, as though his verses were really translations of fragments lucky to survive from some remote and rather butch culture. So, in Cave Birds, his latest sequence, we...

[In the following review of The Hawk in the Rain, Merwin praises Hughes's young talent for its originality and intelligence.]

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, more especially the area around the Calder valley at Hebden Bridge, and to the north of it. In Celtic times, this area was the domain of Elmet, the last of the native tribal lands to fall to the Angles. It subsequently became uninhabited moors and was, 200 years ago, invaded again, this time by industrial progress….

[In the following review, Holkeboer lauds Hughes's Gaudete.]

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, unselfconscious talent simply assimilated awkward items like the W. I. and Jaguar cars—rather as if Hughes was some X-ray visionary who could see the myth throbbing under the bonnet. The common criticism of Hughes is that he is a kind of linguistic Quilp, forcing huge beakers of boiling language down the throats of his readers and wolfing down...

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 not aspire to the density and subtle orchestration of his recent Season Songs, but neither is it … a parcel of left-overs. At the festive level, closest to the nursery, there are several examples of Hughes's verbal juggling and wizardry of scansion … and the comic-strip invention, which is there as an element in much of...

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…. Hughes is often trying to write metrical, rhymed verse. The eeriness of the poems is that they are not even decent doggerel…. The scheme is sometimes to translate earthly lessons to another sphere and thereby make them more interesting and palatable as lessons. In Moon-Freaks, we find that when moon-people want to read, they l...