In Flanders Fields

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Lore & Background

Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969). He was raised among the local farms of the Calder Valley and on the Pennine moorland. The third child, Hughes had a brother Gerald (1920–2016), who was ten years older, and a sister Olwyn Marguerite Hughes (1928–2016), who was two years older than Ted. One of their mother's ancestors, Nicholas Ferrar, had founded the Little Gidding community. Hughes's father, William, a joiner, was of Irish descent. He had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War and fought at Ypres. He narrowly escaped being killed; he was saved when a bullet hit him but lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket. He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything". Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven. After his family moved to Mexborough, he attended Schofield Street Junior School. His 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. He acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats, and curlews. During his time in Mexborough, he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby. He later said that he came to know it "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse", were recollections of the area. At the age of about 13 a friend, John Wholey, took Hughes to his home at Crookhill Lodge, on the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough. There the boys could fish and shoot. 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. Hughes came to view fishing as an almost religious experience. Hughes attended Mexborough Secondary School (later Grammar School), where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry. Teachers Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Hughes was also mentored by teacher John Fisher, and his own sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry. Future poet Harold Massingham also attended this school and was mentored by Fisher. In 1946, one of Hughes's early poems, "Wild West", and a short story were published in the grammar school magazine The Don and Dearne. He published further poems in 1948. By 16, he had no other thought than being a poet. During the same year, Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his national service first. His two years of national service (1949–1951) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire. During this time, he had little to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of W. B. Yeats's poetry.

Reader's Guide

In 1951 Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority on balladic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodgart's supervision, but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary tradition. He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself." In his third year, he transferred to Anthropology and Archaeology, both of which would later inform his poetry. He did not excel as a scholar, receiving only a third-class grade in Part I of the Anthropology and Archaeology Tripos in 1954. His first published poetry appeared in Chequer. A poem, "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in Granta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes had many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. On 25 February 1956, Hughes and his friends held a party to launch St. Botolph's Review, which had a single issue. In it, Hughes had four poems. At the party, he met American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, won multiple awards, and came to the party specifically to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. Hughes and Plath felt a great mutual attraction, but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath passed through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later. Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn, four months after they had first met. They chose the date, Bloomsday, in honour of Irish writer James Joyce. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest. The couple spent most of their honeymoon at Benidorm, in Alicante on Spain's Costa Blanca. Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not tell him about her history of depression and suicide attempts until much later. Reflecting later in Birthday Letters, Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers. On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published in The Nation, Poetry, and The Atlantic. Plath typed up Hughes's manuscript for his collection Hawk in the Rain, which won a competition run by the Poetry centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. The first prize was publication by Harper. Hughes gained widespread critical acclaim after the book's release in September 1957, including a Somerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard-hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of Middle English — a style he used throughout his career — over the more genteel latinate sounds. The couple moved to the United States in 1957 so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College. During this time, Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958, they met artist Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes's books, including Crow. The couple returned to England in 1959, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing: Hughes was working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews, and talks. During this time, he wrote the poems that would later be published in Recklings (1966) and Wodwo (1967). In March 1960, his book Lupercal was published, and it won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. 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. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche, and poetry was the language of that work. Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Hughes (b. 1960) and Nicholas Hughes (1962–2009). In 1961, they bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In the summer of 1962, Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill, who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under the cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962. Plath moved back to London and set up life in a new flat with the children. In 1966, after Plath's death, 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 Hughes is best known. Hughes did not finish the Crow sequence until after his work Cave Birds was published in 1975. In 1967, while living with Wevill, Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar, one of which he gave to his brother and one to his sister. Gerald Hughes' sculpture, branded with the letter 'A' on its forehead, was offered for sale in 2012. Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963. As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath's personal and literary estates. He oversaw the posthumous publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). Hughes was criticized for editing choices he made after Plath's death.

Did You Know?

• Hughes's father, William, was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16).
• Hughes's earliest poem 'The Thought Fox' and earliest story 'The Rain Horse' were recollections of Manor Farm at Old Denaby.
• Hughes and Plath were married on 16 June 1956, choosing the date Bloomsday in honour of Irish writer James Joyce.
• Hughes worked at London Zoo as a washer-upper, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters.
• In 1967, while living with Assia Wevill, Hughes produced two sculptures of a jaguar; one, branded with the letter 'A', was offered for sale in 2012.