HUGHES, TED

born Aug. 16, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, Eng. died Oct. 28, 1998, Devon byname of Edward J. Hughes English poet whose most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. The dialect of Hughes's native West Riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of his verse. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published. Other works soon followed. Selected Poems, with Thom Gunn (a poet whose work is frequently associated with Hughes's as marking a new turn in English verse), was published in 1962. Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath's suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated earlier), but thereafter he published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965 he was coeditor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Some of Hughes's essays on subjects of literary and cultural criticism were published as Winter Pollen (1994). After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of Birthday Letters (1998). In 1984 he was appointed Britain's poet laureate.