TED HUGHES EB

The Unauthorised Life

Jonathan Bate

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780008118235
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

'Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come' Sunday Times

'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography' The Times

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of this book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for posterity.

Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, his book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Note to the Paperback Edition
• Epigraph
• Prologue: The Deposition
• 1. ‘fastened into place’
• 2. Capturing Animals
• 3. Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike
• 4. Goddess
• 5. Burnt Fox
• 6. ‘a compact index of everything to follow’
• 7. Falcon Yard
• 8. 18 Rugby Street
• 9. ‘Marriage is my medium’
• 10. ‘So this is America’
• 11. Famous Poet
• 12. The Grass Blade
• 13. ‘That Sunday Night’
• 14. The Custodian
• 15. The Iron Man
• 16. ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’
• 17. The Crow
• 18. The Savage God
• 19. Farmer Ted
• 20. The Elegiac Turn
• 21. The Arraignment
• 22. Sunstruck Foxglove
• 23. Remembrance of Elmet
• 24. The Fisher King
• 25. The Laureate
• 26. Trial
• 27. A
• 28. Goddess Revisited
• 29. Smiling Public Man
• 30. The Sorrows of the Deer
• 31. The Return of Alcestis
• Epilogue: The Legacy
• Notes
• The Principal Works of Ted Hughes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Picture Section
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Also by Jonathan Bate
• About the Author
• About the Publisher