64 Facts About Ted Hughes

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

Ted Hughes married fellow poet Sylvia Plath, an American, in 1956.

Ted Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry and Edith Ted Hughes.

Ted Hughes was raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland.

The third child, Ted Hughes had a brother Gerald, who was ten years older.

Ted Hughes had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and fought at Ypres.

Ted Hughes narrowly escaped being killed; he was saved when a bullet hit him but 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.

Ted Hughes's parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop in the town.

In Poetry in Making, Hughes recalled that he was fascinated by animals, collecting, and drawing toy lead creatures.

Ted Hughes acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats, and curlews.

Ted Hughes grew up amid the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors.

Ted Hughes later said that he came to know it "better than any place on earth".

Ted Hughes became close to the Wholey family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholey's father, the head gardener and gamekeeper on the estate.

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

Ted Hughes attended Mexborough Secondary School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry.

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

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 to the party especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers.

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

Ted Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn, four months after they had first met.

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

Ted Hughes gained widespread critical acclaim after the book's release in September 1957, including a Somerset Maugham Award.

In 1958, they met artist 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 posthumous publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel.

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

Ted Hughes did not write poetry again for three years.

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 after his work Cave Birds was published in 1975.

Ted Hughes bought a house known as Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, while still maintaining the property at Court Green.

Ted Hughes began cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh, Devon, called Moortown; he used this name as the title of one of his poetry collections.

Ted Hughes collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company.

Ted Hughes dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation, which promotes writing education and has run residential writing courses at Lumb Bank.

In 1993, Ted Hughes made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, reading passages from his 1968 novel The Iron Man.

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

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

Ted Hughes was one of the founding trustees of the Westcountry Rivers Trust, a charity established to restore rivers through catchment-scale management and a close relationship with local landowners and riparian owners.

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.

In January 2013, Carol Ted Hughes announced 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.