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Letters of Ted Hughes

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

Christopher Reid
Faber, 800pp, £30,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Philip Hensher

This is not a considered letter, as that repeated ‘more than ever before’ suggests, but a passionately felt one. It’s well known that Hughes’s relationship, as laureate, with the monarch and her family was warmer and more direct than any laureate’s with a monarch since Tennyson’s with Queen Victoria. It was not just a shared knowledge of livestock and an enjoyment of fishing. Rather, it was a shared belief in the mystical, twinned status of queen and court poet. No one else could have done the job half as well, and some of Hughes’s laureate poems, particularly ‘Rain-charm for the Duchy’, are as wonderful as anything he ever wrote. I don’t suppose they talked much about Jung or anapaestics together: but I guess that two minds in unique positions recognised each other, and I can well believe that he opened his heart and she responded in kind.

Ted Hughes was an enormous, astonishing figure, from that first stupendous volume, A Hawk in the Rain to the very last, Birthday Letters. He looks like probably the greatest poet in English since Auden, whom he didn’t care for much. Years ago the principal interest of this volume would have lain in an inside account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath and the way her suicide and posthumous reputation bore down on him. Birthday Letters, published months before his own death, in my view put an end to all speculation about her for years to come, and provided an entirely plausible account of the tragedy without undue blame or self-exculpation. Afterwards, Hughes seemed like a bigger and greater figure than her. These letters illuminate this splendid, brave, mad imagination.

It can’t be denied, though, that Hughes’s myth-making and understanding of his own art are difficult to follow or to agree with. Oddly, the only talents he gives real praise to among his contemporaries are, Plath aside, very small talents. For him, Spender was the outstanding poet of the MacSpaunday generation. Mothers writing on behalf of their teenage sons’ lyric effusions got generous responses. His most talented contemporaries are dismissed in an unjust phrase or two. Like many of the very greatest — Beethoven couldn’t think of anyone to express admiration for except Cherubini, when asked directly — he had little interest in writers of his own time who were not making inadequate attempts to write like him.

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