Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death

Ted Hughes will be principally remembered for three things: he was once married to Sylvia Plath, who eventually killed herself at the age of thirty; he was an elemental poet preoccupied with nature as an indifferent force of good as well as evil; and he was appointed Poet Laureate on the death of Sir John Betjeman in 1984.

Told mostly through the reminiscences of family and friends, TED HUGHES: STRONGER THAN DEATH told the story of a country boy growing up in rural Yorkshire with a unique sensitivity to the world around him- so sensitive, in fact, that he almost believed that he could assume the identities of all living creatures in a quasi-mystical manner. He went to Cambridge University in the early 1950s to read English, but told of a dream he experienced one night when, after having encountered a fox-man peeping round the door, he realized that the only way to pursue his career as a poet was to change his field of study to anthropology. The story might seem a little far- fetched in the telling, but it attested to Hughes's vivid poetic imagination.

His marriage to Plath led to the making and the breaking of his poetic reputation. She was a proficient editor, whose initiative in sending his first collection of poems, THE HAWK IN THE RAIN, to a poetry competition resulted in his winning first prize and penetrating the public gaze. On the other hand the program suggested that it was Hughes's marital infidelities that had a lot to do with Plath's suicide by driving her into depression and beyond. At this point it seemed as if Hughes's poetic imagination was aggressively masculine, as he wrote about predatory beasts causing havoc within the world.

When his second wife Assia also committed suicide, together with their four-year-old daughter, Hughes's reputation nose-dived, as he became the object of attack by the burgeoning feminist movement. While the poet might have been incidentally responsible for the two women's deaths, it was his poems, rather than the personality, that the feminists objected to.

As time passed, so Hughes^s reputation soared, especially after the publication of his final work, BIRTHDAY LETTERS (1998), an intensely personal piece in which he at last confessed his true feelings about Plath in life as well as in death.

With the help of contributions from his daughter Frieda, fellow- poets Simon Armitage and Elaine Feinstein, his cousin, and his biographer Jonathan Bate, STRONGER THAN DEATH painted a portrait of a complex character capable of great love yet unwilling (or perhaps unable) to admit to his truest feelings - at least in his poetry - until late in life. In earlier work he tended to resolve his conflicts through mythology - the Crow in the great cycle of the late Sixties and early Seventies might stand for himself - but as he grew older, so he made a genuine effort to fulfill his firmly-held belief that poetry possesses a transformative power, somehow cleansing the soul and creating new people as a result.

Viewers might still not like the man, but we cannot help but admire his sincerity and his total commitment to writing poetry, not just to publish books, but as a way of dealing with intense personal problems.