Ted Hughes

British poet Ted Hughes with full name Edward James Hughes served as poet laureate from 1984 to 1998; people note his work for its symbolism, passion, and dark natural imagery. He, the brother of Gerald Hughes and husband of Sylvia Plath, fathered Frieda Hughes and . Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. The dialect of native west riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of verse of Hughes. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern a number of his poems reflected. In 1956, he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year of publication of The Hawk in the Rain , his first volume of verse. Other works quickly followed. The couple earlier separated, and following suicide of Plath in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for almost three years but thereafter published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965, he co-edited the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Winter Pollen (1994) published some of essays of Hughes on subjects of literary and cultural criticism. After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of Birthday Letters (1998).