| Title : | Ted Hughes : the life of a poet | | Material Type: | printed text | | Authors: | Elaine Feinstein, Author | | Edition statement: | 2nd edition | | Publisher: | London : Phoenix | | Publication Date: | 2002 | | Pagination: | xvi, 320 p. | | Size: | 21 cm | | ISBN (or other code): | 978-0-7538-1357-7 | | General note: | Includes bibliographical notes (p. 277-302)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-308)
Includes index (p. 309-320) | | Languages : | English (eng) Original Language : English (eng) | | Descriptors: | Biography
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
| | Class number: | 813.087 | | Abstract: | Ted Hughes was one of the greatest English poets of this century, yet his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963, though he chose to remain silent on the subject for more than 30 years. Many people, including his friend Al Alvarez, have held Hughes's adultery responsible for Plath's death. Elaine Feinstein first met Hughes in 1969, and she was a good friend of his and his sister Olwen's, both of whom guarded the Plath estate. She knows many of the European and America poets who so influenced Hughes - Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Miroslav Holub, and knows the world in which both he and Plath moved.
Review: Elaine wrote a big piece for YOU MAGAZINE which ran on 27 Octoberand we've received lots of review coverage in the paperback review columns including the following : 'her concise and illuminating biography.... the result is never less than enthralling'THE IRISH TIMES 'Feinstein's biography shows the late Poet Laureate as a much more vulnerable and sympathetic figure than the myth all
Review: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are posthumous inspirations for rival teams, each with a strong-armed body of supporters: one team asks for sympathy for Hughes' indisputably tragic and supposedly forbearing life, blighted by a demanding first marriage and by the shadow of two suicides (first Plath's and, later, that of the object of his infidelity, Assia Weevil, who also killed their child); while the other rallies feminist argument in favor of Plath, the wronged genius. This biography is a workmanlike account; the writing is sometimes flat and formulaic ('As Ted and Sylvia drove up to Yorkshire for Christmas that December in their new Morris car, Ted could not but wonder how this visit would go') but the narrative is page-turningly pacy, and we swiftly learn the outline of the two key lives (Sylvia is often in the foreground). Feinstein avoids literary politicking, but there is a bias in Hughes' favor, which leaves us somewhat shocked when she withholds analysis of the poet's compulsive infidelities. As countervailing qualities, we are told of his generosity, his thoughtfulness, his lack of guile and his responsible stewardship of Plath's electrifying poetry - yet there is no real engagement with the more primitive, self-serving side of his nature. Moreover, there is little illumination of his own poetry (except for the autobiographical Birthday Letters, whose provenance remains frustratingly mysterious) and little on Hughes' inner life generally. To take two examples of the many unexplored corners: why was Hughes so deeply attached to his emigre brother Gerald? And what was Hughes' view of the role of the Poet Laureate and of the royal lineage he felt impelled to honor in that capacity? We never learn the answers to these and many other important questions. One day the world needs a longer, deeper account, but in the meantime this biography, which manages to make a virtue of its concision, is well worth acquiring. | | Record link: | https://library.seeu.edu.mk/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=16983 |
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