54 Facts About Ted Hughes

Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer.

Ted Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death.

Ted Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30.

Ted Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry and Edith Ted Hughes, and raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland.

Ted Hughes narrowly escaped being killed when a bullet lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket.

Ted Hughes was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign.

Ted Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family.

Ted Hughes attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven before his family moved to Mexborough, then attending Schofield Street junior school.

Ted Hughes acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats and curlews, growing up surrounded by the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors.

Ted Hughes became close to the family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholly's father, a gamekeeper.

Ted Hughes came to view fishing as an almost religious experience.

Ted Hughes was mentored by his sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry, and another teacher, John Fisher.

Ted Hughes learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of W B Yeats's poetry.

Ted Hughes did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954.

Ted Hughes worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters.

Ted Hughes had already published extensively, having won various awards, and had come especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers.

Ted Hughes visited him again on her return three weeks later.

Ted Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not relate her history of depression and suicide attempts to him until much later.

The couple moved to America so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College; during this time, Ted Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In 1958, they met Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Ted Hughes's books, including Crow.

Ted Hughes found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals.

Ted Hughes began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s.

Ted Hughes believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche and poetry was the language of that work.

Ted Hughes oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel.

Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book and some critics of Ted Hughes argued that he had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy.

Ted Hughes claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath's journal, detailing their last few months together.

In 1966, he wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrative The Life and Songs of the Crow, one of the works for which Ted Hughes is best known.

In 1967, while living with Wevill, Ted Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister; Gerald Ted Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was offered for sale in 2012.

Wevill killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise, the four-year-old daughter of Ted Hughes, born on 3 March 1965.

Ted Hughes did not finish the Crow sequence until the work Cave Birds was published in 1975.

Ted Hughes bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and maintained the property at Court Green.

Ted Hughes began cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon called Moortown, a name which became embedded in the title of one of his poetry collections.

Ted Hughes later became President of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh.

Ted Hughes dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education and runs residential writing courses at Hughes's home at Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire.

Ted Hughes featured in the 1994 documentary Seven Crows A Secret.

In early 1994, Ted Hughes became increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home.

Ted Hughes's funeral was held on 3 November 1998, at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter.

Ted Hughes was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure.

Carol Ted Hughes announced in January 2013 that she would write a memoir of their marriage.

Ted Hughes mentioned Schopenhauer, Robert Graves's book The White Goddess, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Ted Hughes worked for 10 years on a prose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film.

Ted Hughes wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books being The Iron Man, written to comfort his children after their mother Sylvia Plath's suicide.

Ted Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998.

In 1992 Ted Hughes published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a monumental work inspired by Graves's The White Goddess.

Also in 1992, Ted Hughes published Rain Charm for the Duchy, collecting together for the first time his Laureate works, including poems celebrating important royal occasions.

In Birthday Letters, his last collection, Ted Hughes broke his silence on Plath, detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time.

Ted Hughes wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.

The West Riding dialect of Ted Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful.

Ted Hughes re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.

Weissbort and Ted Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known, from such countries as Poland and Hungary, then controlled by the Soviet Union.

On 28 April 2011, a memorial plaque for Ted Hughes was unveiled at North Tawton by his widow Carol Ted Hughes.

In 2010, it was announced that Hughes would be commemorated with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The Ted Hughes Society, founded in 2010, publishes a peer-reviewed on-line journal, which can be downloaded by members.

Many of Ted Hughes's poems have been published as limited-edition broadsides.