A brilliant new study of perhaps the finest English poet of the 20th Century, by a distinguished critic and scholar.
This book (also available in paperback from Troubador) open with a section on Hughes’s life, including an authoritative treatment of the relationship with Sylvia Plath and the effect of her suicide on his poetry and reputation, followed by a review of Hughes’s artistic strategies, his poetic language, and influences on his work, including his openness to mythology and the poets of Eastern Europe. The body of the book offers an approach to reading New Selected Poems (1995), taking in turn each of the remarkable and remarkably varied works from which the poems were selected—The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, Season Songs, Gaudete, Remains of Elmet, Moortown Diary, River and Wolfwatching. It concludes with a review of Hughes’s reception, and a six-page bibliography.
Neil Roberts studied English at the University of Cambridge where he took an MA and PhD. Since 1970 he has taught at the University of Sheffield, where he is Professor of English Literature. He is the author of George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (Elek, 1975), Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (with Terry Gifford, Faber, 1981), The Lover, the Dreamer and the World: the Poetry of Peter Redgrove (Sheffield Academ¬ic Press, 1994), Meredith and the Novel (Macmillan, 1997), Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (Longman, 1999), D. H. Lawrence , Travel and Cultural Difference (Palgrave, 2004), Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006), and D. H. Lawrence: ‘Women in Love’ (Literature Insights, 2007). He is the editor of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Blackwell, 2001) and of The Colour of Radio: Essays and Interviews by Peter Redgrove (Stride, 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Peter Redgrove.
This book (also available in paperback from Troubador) open with a section on Hughes’s life, including an authoritative treatment of the relationship with Sylvia Plath and the effect of her suicide on his poetry and reputation, followed by a review of Hughes’s artistic strategies, his poetic language, and influences on his work, including his openness to mythology and the poets of Eastern Europe. The body of the book offers an approach to reading New Selected Poems (1995), taking in turn each of the remarkable and remarkably varied works from which the poems were selected—The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, Season Songs, Gaudete, Remains of Elmet, Moortown Diary, River and Wolfwatching. It concludes with a review of Hughes’s reception, and a six-page bibliography.
Neil Roberts studied English at the University of Cambridge where he took an MA and PhD. Since 1970 he has taught at the University of Sheffield, where he is Professor of English Literature. He is the author of George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (Elek, 1975), Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (with Terry Gifford, Faber, 1981), The Lover, the Dreamer and the World: the Poetry of Peter Redgrove (Sheffield Academ¬ic Press, 1994), Meredith and the Novel (Macmillan, 1997), Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (Longman, 1999), D. H. Lawrence , Travel and Cultural Difference (Palgrave, 2004), Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006), and D. H. Lawrence: ‘Women in Love’ (Literature Insights, 2007). He is the editor of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Blackwell, 2001) and of The Colour of Radio: Essays and Interviews by Peter Redgrove (Stride, 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Peter Redgrove.
