Collected Poems

by Ted Hughes and Blake Hughes

Book Overview

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374529655
• ISBN13: 9780374529659
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 1376 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.4" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

WINGBURSTS

For me Hughes is the great poet of the past century and perhaps the greatest since Wild Bill Shakespeare. The sooner you get into this BIG book the sooner you will enter a place where language lifts into spirit and all your received ideas about poetry blow away. In English, Hart Crane took the first step at creating a music that rides above mere meaning where words gather force from their magnetic auras. I am reminded of Beethoven who wrote back to a musician complaining of the difficulty of his writing, Do you think I think of your wretched fiddle when I write my music? Beside Hughes, Crane now seems stiff and over-varnished. In Hughes words enter a quantum universe, are never in the same place twice, and forever split open with fresh bursts of meaning. Even so you have to get past the early stuff (as with Shakespeare's early history plays) to find Hughes at hurricane force. Let me recommend as well his translations of Greek and Roman plays and his Phedre where his lines rip away all musty classicism and slap your imagination to life: you are just born and learning to taste with the tongues of the ancients. Note in the other reviews here how Hughes loosens the reviewers' chains and urges them to dance on coals and burn their feet in service to the Goddess. BUY THIS BOOK.

Amazing, Amazing. Amazing.

Without a doubt the best thing I've read in half a year. A keeper, a gem, a wealth between covers. What a book. What a writer. His flow, rhythm, depth, lilt, phrasing are unequalled by any contemporary writer I know. He was a great, great writer and this book does justice to his memory.

!!!FIRE-VERVE!!!

a creative poet, one whose syntactical leaps into innovation forever shine and shock-thrill, an aggressive poet, one who breeds the leopard, who polishes the claw, who is quite willing to gash, hate-slice and bedevil. known for having encouraged silvia plath to allow her ear to be bitten on their first date - his odd love poems in some of his first collection of poetry a gem-marvel into obscurity and tangled emotion. he is a brilliant surveyor of the jungle of irrationality - truly entertaining in his blush with the minotaur of tradition, a mangled mind of pure scourge and lava. author of Lorelei Pursued and Wrestles with God

Bury the Hate, Celebrate the Greatness

Ted Hughes has been reviled for over four decades for his part in the life and death of the poet Sylvia Plath. So strong is her mythology that many have relegated Hughes to a minor role, a bit player, in her epic tragedy. Plath was an astonishing and powerful poet. In the end she became one of the best poets of the twentieth century. So did her one-time husband.Ted Hughes evidently had a great many faults both specifically as a man and more generally as a human being. This book has nothing to do with that, for either good or bad. Anyone familiar with the private lives of such artists as James Joyce and Picasso already know that artistic greatness does not guarantee moral greatness. We rightly celebrate their work.This book collects the work of someone who touched greatness many times over a long and distinguished career. It includes not only the "official" editions originally published by Faber and Faber, but also work from literary journals and small-press editions. It is a volume from which Hughes work volcanically erupts, rather than develop in small increments."Crow" is one of the great cycle of poems in the English language. At last we can see other poems that both led to and came after this landmark work. Hughes revisited and revised throughout his career, and this volume does not cheat us of this growth. There are poems with the same content but possessing different names. There are poems with the same name but different contents. All have their place in the lexicon presented here.Ted Huges was much more than "Mr. Plath." An accomplished poet, a skilled translator, a visionary, Ted Hughes' work transcends Ted Hughes. We must celebrate his work and let it take its place amongst the other great works of our times. Revisit what you may have already known of his poems. Discover the work that is new and glorious to you. And know that one may transcend personal limitations and achieve greatness.