Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose - Softcover

Hughes, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031214766X ISBN 13: 9780312147662

Publisher: Picador USA, 1996

Synopsis

Spanning a period of thirty years, a wide-ranging collection of writing about poetry and literature by the Poet Laureate of England includes reflections on the creative process and such figures as Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

From Publishers Weekly

Ted Hughes is familiar to American readers primarily as the husband of poet Sylvia Plath, not as the poet laureate of England. In this first collection of his prose, much of it previously published in various American and British journals, six of the 43 reviews, prefaces and critical essays directly engage Plath's work and life, over which he is known to be protective. He is suspicious of scholars, and the longer pieces, on such traditionally academic subjects as poetic meter and form, are written in his sonorous poet's voice, in prose that recalls T.S. Eliot's restrained irony and force of opinion. Hughes offers learned, unpretentious historical exegeses of Shakespeare, Greek Myth and the genre of Trickster Tales. He reads his fellow poets, such as Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Eliot and Plath with unfailing sympathy and intelligence, allowing us to glimpse the poets themselves through their work; his evident pleasure in them becomes our own. Scammell, a poet and critic himself, has arranged the volume thematically so that Hughes's incisive, comprehensive take on literature and poetics emerges fully, especially over the multiple readings these essays demand.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 031214766X
• ISBN 13: 9780312147662
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Editor: Seammell William