Hughes, Edward James

▪ 1999

      British poet (b. Aug. 17, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, Eng.—d. Oct. 28, 1998, London, Eng.), was renowned for over four decades for his powerful poetry—much of it featuring evocative images of nature and the violence of animals—and from 1984 served as Great Britain's poet laureate. Any celebration for his own accomplishments, however, was largely overshadowed by the notoriety that attended his having been the husband of the emotionally troubled American poet Sylvia Plath and, on the basis of her writings, blamed by many for her suicide. Hughes read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, for two years and then switched to the study of anthropology and archaeology, graduating in 1954. In 1956 he met Plath at a party at Cambridge, where she was then a student, and four months later they married. Hughes had begun writing poetry, and in 1957 his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published to great acclaim. Another volume, Lupercal (1960), brought him more success. Plath's emotional difficulties, which had led her to attempt suicide before she met Hughes, increasingly plagued her; the marriage deteriorated, and Hughes left her for poet Assia Wevill. In 1963 Plath gassed herself to death, but the fame of her pain-filled poems and journals—most of them published by Hughes after her death—grew, and Plath came to be seen as a legend, martyred by the callous treatment of her husband. Her tombstone was repeatedly defaced to remove Hughes's name. (In 1969 Wevill, too, committed suicide by gassing herself and her daughter by Hughes.) In 1970 Hughes remarried, moved out to the countryside, and wrote prolifically, not only poetry but also prose for both children and adults. In addition, he translated the works of others, edited Plath's writings, wrote plays, campaigned to protect the environment, and served as executor of Plath's literary estate. His collections Moortown (1979; reissued as Moortown Diary, 1989), The Remains of Elmet (1979), and River (1983) were among his finer works of that period. In 1997 Hughes published Tales from Ovid, adapted from Ovid's Metamorphoses; it won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and a W.H. Smith prize. In 1998, aware that he was dying of the cancer that had afflicted him for several months, he finally told his story of his relationship with Plath. The intense Birthday Letters became a best-seller in both the U.S. and the U.K. and won the Forward Poetry Prize. Less than two weeks before his death, Hughes received the rare honour of being given the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.

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