A poet of unpoetic times

and a huge influence on other poets, from Seamus Heaney to R.S. Thomas. Beyond his surface subject material, any first reader of his work is most likely to be struck by its extreme intensity, a quality which it shares with the work of Plath.

Unlike Plath, however, Hughes worked on a much grander canvas. He is perhaps best seen as a critic of the mainstream of western culture, particularly of the utilitarian rationalism arising from the Enlightenment. In this he is in linewith such writers as William Blake, W.B. Yeats and D.H. Lawrence.

Although his sharp sense of humour has often been insufficiently acknowledged, this owes a lot to the uncompromising texture of the poetry, the sense in which in each poem, it is more than England, more than the West, which is at stake it is existence itself.

As a poetic force, Hughes emerged in 1957 with the publication of the much-lauded, prize-winning collection The Hawk in the Rain. Like the work of the Angry Young Men writers, such as John Osborne, Hughes’s debut criticises the lack of vitality in post-war English society. While the book shows some traces of being influenced by writers like Hopkins, Auden and Graves, it was a confident and original beginning.

The landscape of Hughes’s early work, which remained a major inspiration throughout his career, was that of the Yorkshire Pennines where he grew up. Hughes was born in the Calder Valley, in a town with the evocative name of Mytholmroyd. In a manner reminiscent ofWordsworth, his childhood was shadowed over by a 600-foot high scoop face, known as Scout Rock. Hughes, together with his older brother, Gerald, used to explore the region around the rock and it quickly came to dominate his imagination.

Hughes encountered the survivor ethos in an extreme and troubling form in Sylvia Plath, his first wife. Hughes met her at a Cambridge literary party in February 1956, and, after a sizzling romance, they were married four months later. It was Plath’s drive and organisational abilities, together with the faith which she had in his work, which hugely contributed to the publication of The Hawk in the Rain.

A brilliant student, troubled by the early loss of her father, and by the high but confused expectations of those around her, Plath had been fortunate to survive a previous suicide attempt. Initially the stronger poetic force, Hughes made his wide, esoteric reading and his poetic theories and processes available to her. Their inner worlds, to a large degree,converged.

At Cambridge University, Hughes had begun his degree in English, but after two years, discouraged by the course’s limited horizons, he switched to anthropology. His second book, Lupercal was published in 1960. Although not the most ambitious of his books, Hughes emerged in it as a fully mature and powerful poet. With the success of Lupercal, Hughes was now recognised as one of the major poets of his generation. He continued to read into ever more exotic literary territory. He was a counter-culturalist, embracing Zen and Sufi literature, later turning to Tamil and Taoist writings.

While his literary career was going from strength to strength, the same could not be said of his personal life. Although Plath had borne him two children, he had gradually become alienated from her mood-swings and jealousy. After beginning an affair with a married woman, Assia Wevill, he separted from Plath. Left in her London flat bringing two children up alone, Plath became increasingly depressed duringthe unprecedently harsh winter of 1962-3. It was in this period that she wrote her deeply pessimistic poetic masterpiece, Ariel. She committed suicide in February.

Hughes now entered a somewhat rootless period with his two children, moving back and forth through the 1960s from Ireland to Devon. The experimental volume Wodwo consolidated the success of Lupercal, but Hughes’s personal life was to undergo further trauma with the death of the woman for whom he had left Plath, Assia Wevill, and her daughter Shura, in 1969. It was also the year his mother died. These tragedies heavily scorched the poems of his fourth book, the one which is most likely to endure and for which he is most famous, Crow.

In 1970 Hughes married his second wife Carol Orchard and finally settled in Devon. From this point on his personal life became more peaceful, and the work began to lose a little of its intensity. After becoming poet-laureate his collections in the 1980s seem to fall off from his earlierheights. But there are many who regard his more recent books, The Birthday Letters, his unexpected poetic memoir of his marriage to Plath, and especially his translations in Tales from Ovid as close to his best work. He is survived by his wife Carol, and a daughter and son from his first marriage.

— The Observer News Service