Ted hughes biography bate
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After Crow in 1970, even devoted fans could spot the decline in quality. I don’t see why readers that disliked Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being actually should ‘atone’ for that opinion, or why Bate thinks they should.
These flaws aside, this is an engaging, level-headed biography, fair to its subject, and with a proper respect for the human suffering it probes.
In fact, as Erica Wagner says in Ariel’s Gift, the style of the book had more in common with Hughes’ superb 1979 collection Moortown Diary - looser, dialogic, more willing to risk feeling. It is a book that honors, though not uncritically, Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.
Biographer Jonathan Bate on his book Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
Description
Eleanor Wachtel speaks with Jonathan Bate about his new biography of Ted Hughes.
Writers & company
Authorship--Anecdotes
Bate, Jonathan
Authors, English--Interviews
Bate, Jonathan. Some appeared in the 1981 and 1994 editions of Hughes' Selected Poems without comment. These were poems that had to be written.
Hughes' favourite childhood book seems to have been Tarka the Otter.
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath
Crow. The journey it traces from Number 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd to Buckingham Palace is remarkable. The feminist writer Erica Jong (she who coined the phrase ‘zipless fuck’) and her attraction to Hughes is weirdly fascinating. Not all the Sylvia poems made the cut, and not all saw publication even in limited editions afterwards. It was a crude view, hence its reliance on strict binary opposites, on black and white.
A creative force of rare power and grace, Hughes's poetry engages with the mythical and natural worlds to reflect on the strength, vulnerability and beauty of being.
With the time ripe for posterity to see further into Hughes's works, Jonathan Bate's rich and compelling biography examines those 'places of high wonder' of which Hughes wrote as a teenager, and brings new depth and understanding to this most charismatic and fascinating of poets: his life, his poetry and of course, his relationships - most famously with iconic American poet Sylvia Plath, his wife, who committed suicide in 1963, and Assia Wevill, the woman he left Plath for, who herself committed suicide in 1969.
"Bate has written, capaciously, arrestingly, a kind of tragedy...often veers close to the poet's singular perspective...He reminds us Ted Hughes was a marvelous poet: firstly, then fitfully, and then in a blaze near the end, and that the greatness in the work draws power from sources deeper than myth." - Glyn Maxwell, New York Times Book Review
"Magisterially respectful of Hughes...An uncompromising biographer [who] hasn't been swayed by interested parties...In Hughes's life, with its echoes of Greek tragedy, Bate finds grist for a new perspective on his work." - Christopher Benfey, The Atlantic
"An incisive, humane and deeply absorbing account of Hughes's life and work." - New York Times
"Remarkable...one of the very best biographies in years." - Joyce Carol Oates
"A masterly biography." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Jonathan Bate is a dazzling scholar, and in TED HUGHES he sheds new light on the poet and his times...Mr.
) Hughes’ voice, as Bate puts it, became a ‘parody self', a rehash of the worst of Crow without the directness and clarity of its best. Hughes' Mother Edith was something of a mystic, complaining since childhood of spectral hands touching her own. They are circles within which he conjures up presence.’ You long for a second volume of Hughes' correspondence, filled solely with letters between the two.
The ritual, shamanistic aspect of poetry certainly appealed to Hughes.
Early hunting expeditions did not always run smoothly.
Bate also unearths some interesting finds. Hughes’ comments about American poets still seem accurate over fifty years later: their only real grounding was their selves and their family, ‘Never a locality, or a community, or an organisation of ideas, or a private imagination.’
I have some gripes.
I doubt many will agree that Hughes was one of the great Poet Laureates.