Early life , Yorkshire Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in
Mytholmroyd in the
West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969). He was raised among the local farms of the
Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. The third child, Hughes had a brother Gerald (1920–2016), who was ten years older. Next came their sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016), who was two years older than Ted. One of their mother's ancestors,
Nicholas Ferrar, had founded the
Little Gidding community. Most of the more recent generations of the family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. Hughes's father, William, a
joiner, was of Irish descent. He had enlisted with the
Lancashire Fusiliers in the
First World War and fought at
Ypres. He narrowly escaped being killed; he was saved when a bullet hit him but lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket. The stories of
Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven. After his family moved to
Mexborough, he attended Schofield Street Junior School. During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at Old
Denaby. He later said that he came to know it "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse", were recollections of the area. At the age of about 13 a friend, John Wholey, took Hughes to his home at Crookhill Lodge, on the Crookhill estate above
Conisbrough. There the boys could fish and shoot. Hughes became close to the Wholey family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholey's father, the head gardener and
gamekeeper on the estate. Hughes came to view fishing as an almost religious experience. His two years of national service (1949–1951) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the
RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire. During this time, he had little to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for
Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself." He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954. His first published poetry appeared in
Chequer. After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes had many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for the British film company
J. Arthur Rank. He worked at
London Zoo as a washer-upper, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. Hughes and his friends held a party to launch ''
St. Botolph's Review'', which had a single issue. In it, Hughes had four poems. At the party, he met American poet
Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a
Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, won multiple awards, and came to the party specifically to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. Hughes and Plath felt a great mutual attraction, but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath passed through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later. {{Quote box|align=right|bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, at
St George the Martyr, Holborn, four months after they had first met. They chose the date,
Bloomsday, in honour of Irish writer
James Joyce. Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not tell him about her history of depression and suicide attempts until much later. Plath typed up Hughes's manuscript for his collection
Hawk in the Rain, which won a competition run by the Poetry centre of the
Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. During this time, he wrote the poems that would later be published in
Recklings (1966) and
Wodwo (1967). In March 1960, his book
Lupercal was published, and it won the
Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche, and poetry was the language of that work. In 1966, after Plath's death, he wrote poems to accompany
Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrative
The Life and Songs of the Crow, one of the works for which Hughes is best known. Hughes did not finish the
Crow sequence until after his work
Cave Birds was published in 1975.
Sylvia Plath's death Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963. Plath, who had a history of suicide attempts, tucked her two children into bed before putting her head in the oven and taking her own life through the inhalation of gas. She died during one of the coldest winters Britain had experienced in decades, with severe frost and frozen pipes, making life difficult for her and her young children in London. When Plath died, Hughes was in bed with his lover at the time, Susan Alliston. As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the posthumous publication of her manuscripts, including
Ariel (1965). Hughes was criticized for editing choices he made after Plath's death, like omitting the poem "The Jailer" and "The Rabbit Catcher" from
Ariel. Some of the poems omitted include themes of domestic abuse and rape. In a 2004 edition of
Ariel, twelve poems were added in, and Hughes wrote they were initially omitted because they were “personally aggressive.” Hughes admitted to destroying the final volume of Plath's journal which detailed their last few months together. In his foreword to
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), he defended his actions as a consideration toward his young children. Feminists and fans of Sylvia Plath's work were upset and argued that he had essentially driven Plath to suicide and should not be responsible for her literary legacy. Plath's mother said she witnessed Hughes attempt to strangle Plath on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain. Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her, including an incident two days before she miscarried their second child in 1961. That letter also said Hughes told Plath he wishes she were dead. Feminist
Robin Morgan published a poem "Arraignment", in her book
Monster (1972), where she said Hughes murdered Plath. She references Plath's poem "The Jailer", where Plath writes, "I have been drugged and raped." Following Plath's death and Morgan's poem, feminists repeatedly heckled Hughes in public and even threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name. Following Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote two poems expressing his grief, "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat". He did not write poetry again for three years. He broadcast extensively, wrote critical essays, and became involved in running
Poetry International with
Patrick Garland and
Charles Osborne, in the hopes of connecting English poetry with the rest of the world. On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide, Assia Wevill took her own life by the same method: asphyxiation from a gas stove. Wevill also killed her daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), whose father was Hughes. These deaths resulted in reports that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.
1970–1998 – an 18th-century mill-owner's house, once Hughes's home In August 1970, Hughes married a second time, to Carol Orchard, a nurse. They were together until his death. Heather Clark in her biography of Plath,
Red Comet (2021), observed that Hughes "would never be faithful to a woman after he left Plath". Hughes bought a house known as
Lumb Bank near
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, while still maintaining the property at
Court Green. He also began cultivating a small farm near
Winkleigh, Devon, called
Moortown; he used this name as the title of one of his poetry collections. Later he served as the president of the charity
Farms for City Children, established by his friend
Michael Morpurgo in
Iddesleigh. set up the Rainbow Press. Between 1971 and 1981, it published sixteen titles, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes,
Ruth Fainlight,
Thom Gunn, and
Seamus Heaney. The works were printed by Daedalus Press in Norfolk,
Rampant Lions Press, and the John Roberts Press. Hughes was appointed
Poet Laureate in December 1984, following
Sir John Betjeman. A collection of his animal poems for children had been published by Faber earlier that year,
What is the Truth?, illustrated by R. J. Lloyd. For that work he won the annual
Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award. In 1993, Hughes made a rare television appearance for
Channel 4, reading passages from his 1968 novel
The Iron Man. He was featured in the 1994 documentary
Seven Crows A Secret. In early 1994, increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home, Hughes became involved in conservation activism. He was one of the founding trustees of the
Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity established to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners. Hughes was appointed a member of the
Order of Merit by
Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. He had continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal heart attack on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment for
colon cancer in
Southwark, London. On 3 November 1998, his funeral was held at
North Tawton church, and he was cremated in
Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet
Seamus Heaney, said: "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken." On 16 March 2009,
Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide in his home in
Alaska. He had suffered from depression. In January 2013, Carol Hughes announced that she would write a memoir of their marriage.
The Times headlined its story "Hughes's widow breaks silence to defend his name" and observed that "for more than 40 years she has kept her silence, never once joining in the furious debate that has raged around the late Poet Laureate since the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath." Hughes's brother Gerald published a memoir late in 2014, ''Ted and I: A Brother's Memoir
. Kirkus Reviews'' described it as "a warm recollection of a lauded poet". ==Work==