[New-Poetry] Hughes missives

[jforjames at aol.com]

>From The Sunday TimesOctober 21, 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher ReidReviewed by John Carey 

Ted Hughes generated more scandal than any English poet except Byron. But the power of these letters does not depend on their revelations about his private life. It issues from the radiant aliveness of his language and imagination. Mundane subjects whirl into comic fantasy – the potatoes in his vegetable patch “rumbling in the earth like contented elephant herds”, his peas “wandering the neighbourhood and assaulting the local beauties”. Animals and birds are endlessly reinvented – swifts zipping into their nests “like bullets into earth”, a stray hedgehog “snivelling and snuffling his heart out”, a cat washing itself “until its wrists look sore”. Write in your own way, he told Sylvia Plath, “and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room”. 


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