Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life - Softcover

Bate, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0008118213 ISBN 13: 9780008118211

Publisher: William Collins, 2016

Synopsis

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him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity.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

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Bate is a biographer, critic, and broadcaster. His many books include The Genius of Shakespeare, described by Sir Peter Hall as "the best modern book on Shakespeare"; a biography of the poet John Clare, which won Britain's two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize; Soul of the Age, an intellectual life of Shakespeare, which was runner-up for the Biography Prize of PEN America; and The Song of the Earth, a pioneering book on poetry and the environment. He is also the author of a novel, The Cure for Love, and the hit one-man play for Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare. A fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is provost of Worcester College and professor of English literature at Oxford University. Married to the author Paula Byrne, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to higher education and was knighted in 2015 for his services to literary scholarship.

Review

“Bate has written, capaciously, arrestingly, a kind of tragedy...often veers close to the poet’s singular perspective...He reminds us Ted Hughes was a marvelous poet: firstly, then fitfully, and then in a blaze near the end, and that the greatness in the work draws power from sources deeper than myth.” (Glyn Maxwell, New York Times Book Review)

“Magisterially respectful of Hughes...An uncompromising biographer [who] hasn’t been swayed by interested parties...In Hughes’s life, with its echoes of Greek tragedy, Bate finds grist for a new perspective on his work.” (Christopher Benfey, The Atlantic)

“An incisive, humane and deeply absorbing account of Hughes’s life and work.” (New York Times)

“Remarkable...one of the very best biographies in years.” (Joyce Carol Oates)

“A masterly biography.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Jonathan Bate is a dazzling scholar, and in TED HUGHES he sheds new light on the poet and his times...Mr. Bate embodies...the touchstone of good biography: the complete sympathy of complete detachment.” (Sara Wheeler, in "The Best Biographies of 2015," Wall Street Journal)

“A vigorous biography... Bate, a professor of literature, gives sustained attention to Hughes’s poems, substantiating the poet’s own view that “as an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life.” (The New Yorker)

“An excellent biography: compulsively readable, elegantly assembled... and sensitive to the many aspects of Hughes’s grand and complicated character.” (Christopher Wiman, Wall Street Journal, front page review)

“An intelligent, even donnish work of criticism that connects the poems to the life...” (Washington Post)

“...Bate has provided new depth to Ted Hughes’ biography...” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“This scrupulous biography acknowledges and explicates Hughes’s brilliance as one of the twentieth century’s great poets...Hughes deserved a fine biographer, and in Bate he got one.” (Daily Beast)

“Imaginative, comprehensive...worthy of becoming the standard life of Hughes. Illuminating, elegant, and excellent.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

“Scrupulous and lucid... [Hughes] was a dedicated and brilliantly sharp-eyed recorder of material that might or might not one day get hammered into poetry, and even the tiny pieces that Bate gives us glitter.” (The Guardian)

“Illuminating.” (Daily Mail (London))

Edition details

• Publisher: William Collins
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0008118213
• ISBN 13: 9780008118211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 672