Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life By Jonathan Bate and 2

Appropriately, there is an almost mythic quality to Ted Hughes' life. Absurdly talented and good looking, he pairs up with Sylvia Plath and together they spur each other on to become two of the century's greatest poets. Their relationship, here compared to Cathy Audiobook This doomed couple have, probably, had as much written about them (from so many perspectives) as any of what passes for a relationship and what (so often) is a strange kind of conflict. I remember the winter of 1962/63 (being snowed in, on the Yorkshire Jonathan Bate and 2 I found this book almost unputdownable. It was fascinating from start to finish, even though I have read a number of other books about Ted Hughes and am pretty familiar with his story. I enjoyed the insights into his poetic thought processes and the imaginative in depth

A magisterial life of Ted Hughes identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness and one of Britain's most important writers to be published on National Poetry Day by prize winning biographer Jonathan Bate. Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th 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 scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes' 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behind him a complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes' inner life, preserved by him for posterity.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' life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes' poetry and the art of life writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes' own. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

I am only an eighth of the way in, but it is indeed a scholarly read. I have been a fan of Mr Hughes poetry for over 20 years. This book inspires me to seek out the source of his writings, both figurative (in the works of authors such as Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney) and Audiobook I found this book absorbing and interesting. I have read many books about Plath and Hughes, but never one before which continued to write about Ted Hughes' life in detail after the shocking death of his wife, Sylvia. Bate is sympathetic towards him in many ways, while being This is a ground breaking biography by the Oxford academic Jonathan Bate. He gives a fully balanced portrait of very complex and multi faceted personality. In view of the estate's withdrawal of co operation Bates has pulled off the impossible the first biography of There's a spoof extreme exam paper in which, under the heading 'Epistemology,' the student is invited to 'take up a position for or against Truth. Prove the validity of your position.' Anyone venturing into the tortured landscape of the Hughes/Plath relationship must feel The British have an obsession with the sex lives of celebrities, often to such an extent that it distorts any balanced assessment of an individual’s accomplishments, whether political sporting or creative. Many of the reviews of Jonathon Bate’s biography, and indeed the Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life