Ted Hughes, Jonathan Bate
Ted Hughes, Jonathan Bate
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Ted Hughes
The Unauthorised Life

Author: Jonathan Bate

Narrator: Mike Grady

Unabridged: 25 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Harper

Published: 10/13/2015

Synopsis

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art. 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.

About Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate is a biographer, critic, and broadcaster. His many books include The Genius of Shakespeare, described by Sir Peter Hall as "the best modern book on Shakespeare"; a biography of the poet John Clare, which won Britain's two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize; Soul of the Age, an intellectual life of Shakespeare, which was runner-up for the Biography Prize of PEN America; and The Song of the Earth, a pioneering book on poetry and the environment. He is also the author of a novel, The Cure for Love, and the hit one-man play for Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare. A fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is provost of Worcester College and professor of English literature at Oxford University. Married to the author Paula Byrne, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to higher education and was knighted in 2015 for his services to literary scholarship.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ryan on March 23, 2021

When Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters in 1998 it became the fastest selling work of poetry in history. Critics were astounded, readers old and young were converted, prizes were scooped. Comparisons were drawn with erupting volcanoes. There was a feeling of immense pressure forcing the poems upw......more

Goodreads review by Nicola on November 01, 2015

I have just finished this book in the last twenty minutes or so and am still in the throes of reading it. This was a glorious read for many reasons but perhaps the most important one is that it has given me a brand new and utterly rounded account of Ted Hughes as a poet, father, lover and husband. I......more

Goodreads review by Carl on October 14, 2015

What a rueful concession for a biographer to make: Ted Hughes remains “her husband,” the poet who presided over what — in a remorseful moment — Hughes himself called the murder of Sylvia Plath. In an exculpatory narrative, Jonathan Bate tries to reverse the momentum of literary history, making Plath......more

Goodreads review by Helen on February 18, 2019

I feel slightly guilty filing this on my 'Sylvia Plath' shelf, but having read this brilliant biography, I feel somewhat justified. I've admired Bate's writing on Shakespeare and related subjects, and he's done a masterly job of writing about Ted Hughes - a great poet who wrote a lot of bad poetry a......more

Goodreads review by James on January 21, 2016

Great poets like Ted Hughes deserve great biographies. This is a very good one, if not great. The qualifier seems necessary because there were limitations placed on the biographer Jonathan Bate. The first to be given access to the huge archive of Hughes's unpublished writings, permission was later r......more

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