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Collected Poems
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 O...more
Paperback, 1376 pages
Published
June 13th 2005
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(first published 2003)
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wow wow I am smitten and awestruck. A dear friend was reading some of the poems early saturday afternoon as I lay on his bed watching the light...
This one.
Tractor
The tractor stands frozen an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. ...more
This one.
Tractor
The tractor stands frozen an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. ...more
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This is a very valuable book. It not only contains the uncollected work of the poet laureate, but includes poems out of Howls and Whispers of which only a limited number of copies were printed by the Gehenna Press. As widower of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill (who both committed suicide), Hughes is able to express anger about what happened but also beauty when he finds himself in nature. Who else would come up with this picturesque phrase for butterflies: “Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat ...more
I rate this as one of my best buys of 2008. For your money (£17.99 for the paperback) you get an absolutely enormous tome of work. Even though I have read most of TH's poetry in the individual volumes, I feel that I never fully appreciated them until I read them again in this book.
TH often revisited certain events in his poetry, usually after many years, expanding on themes and emotions. As this collection is so wonderfully edited (Faber) it is easy to link up poems on the same subje...more
TH often revisited certain events in his poetry, usually after many years, expanding on themes and emotions. As this collection is so wonderfully edited (Faber) it is easy to link up poems on the same subje...more
I'm astonished every time I settle down with this book. Hughes is my favorite English postwar poet (well, unless you count Thom Gunn). For a couple decades I was prejudiced against him because I read The Savage God at an impressionable age. Then one afternoon I picked up a slim volume of his selected poetry in a Vancouver bookstore. I read his Crow poems; I was transfixed right there in the aisle of Chapters, blocking polite Canadians from browsing. I was floored.
Crow's First Lesson ...more
Crow's First Lesson ...more
I was hoping to love Ted Hughes, as I'd heard about his preoccupation with animals and myth, two poetic interests that I share. Also, I've fallen in love with Sylvia Plath this summer, which further piqued my interest in him. After spending some time with his Collected, I think I like his poetry, but am not in love with it. The books "Crow," "Season Songs," "Moortown Diary," and "Birthday Letters" stood out to me the most. Another reason I thought Ted Hugh...more
The third part of the poem Out by Ted Hughes, Remembrance Day
The context of this poem is 11th November, Remembrance Day, the day the armistice of the First World War was made in 1918. Ted Hughes’s father and many other Yorkshire men fought in the war taking part in the Gallipoli battle, being one of the few survivors of it. The poem has three separate parts and it is written in 1967, but Hughes has told that when he started to write poetry after 1945, he wrote a great deal ab...more
The context of this poem is 11th November, Remembrance Day, the day the armistice of the First World War was made in 1918. Ted Hughes’s father and many other Yorkshire men fought in the war taking part in the Gallipoli battle, being one of the few survivors of it. The poem has three separate parts and it is written in 1967, but Hughes has told that when he started to write poetry after 1945, he wrote a great deal ab...more
I just received The Collected Poems as a gift and cannot express how I have lusted after this book.
I can now finally stop extending the library copy I have been jealously hogging these past months and let some other poor soul have it.
What can I say. Possibly Ted Hughes is a bit like Marmite, you either love him or hate him.
The ferocious nihilism of his poems can really rip into your comfort zone and that is a big part of why I love them so much.
I like having m...more
I can now finally stop extending the library copy I have been jealously hogging these past months and let some other poor soul have it.
What can I say. Possibly Ted Hughes is a bit like Marmite, you either love him or hate him.
The ferocious nihilism of his poems can really rip into your comfort zone and that is a big part of why I love them so much.
I like having m...more
Ted Hughes is probably the greatest British post-WWII poet and possibly the best of the 20th Century. He would have been significant if he had only ever produced his debut collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in which he rescued nature observation from the Romantics, bringing a post-Darwinian sensibility to foxes, horses, hawks, jaguars and more. Subsequent collections continued this theme with robust, sometimes brutal language deployed to acheive his aims. The a-moral savagery of the Hawk Roost...more
Enduring
Something in you that was not meant to die:
A voice we never knew we had
Uttering out of the bowels of earth
Its taut, Yorkshire vowels,
Its own sturdy music.
Uncompromising in your ambivalences
Half nihilist, half priest,
Carrying nature’s indifference like a crucifix;
Surviving the hell of your passions
And leaving us words so charged,
So lovingly held:
Like sacraments through which we access
Ancient futures.
...more
Something in you that was not meant to die:
A voice we never knew we had
Uttering out of the bowels of earth
Its taut, Yorkshire vowels,
Its own sturdy music.
Uncompromising in your ambivalences
Half nihilist, half priest,
Carrying nature’s indifference like a crucifix;
Surviving the hell of your passions
And leaving us words so charged,
So lovingly held:
Like sacraments through which we access
Ancient futures.
...more
Fabulous for the uncollected poems, the additional "crow" poems. While it follows the publication history of Hughes' books, it doesn't include poems that he subsequently revised. Only some of Gaudette is included and virtually all of the children's poetry is excluded.
A vast tome of a book full of treasures, contains all my favourites plus extra uncollecteds.
A gem. Publishes previously unavailable and hard to find work that spans his career.
love the poetry of Ted Hughes and the simplicity of the poems too a must read.
The benefit of Goodreads is you get to expand your horizons. Due to several great reviews of Mr. Hughes's work I finally got around to reading "The Iron Man" (the book one of my favorite movies, The Iron Giant, was based on) and this huge volume of his poetry. I've mentioned before that I'm not much of a poetry person. A lot of it I just don't get. Mr. Hughes's work, however, was a joy to read! I'm always happy when I can add another poet to my slowly-growing list of "poets I...more
I need to come back to this when I'm more patient/willing to read about, in explicit detail, farm animals giving birth.
One day, I'm going to read Hughes' Collected Poems alongside Plath's.
The section of most interest to me was "Birthday Letters". I found it the most accessible to start with, and steadily worked through it. Some of those are a punch in the gut! I like the one about when Sylvia had a fever and kept complaining that she was going to die, and the poem says something about if she keeps crying wolf, he won't know when things are really bad.
The section of most interest to me was "Birthday Letters". I found it the most accessible to start with, and steadily worked through it. Some of those are a punch in the gut! I like the one about when Sylvia had a fever and kept complaining that she was going to die, and the poem says something about if she keeps crying wolf, he won't know when things are really bad.
Beasty, fishy, hunty poetry-y. Reading this has been a bit like carrying a brick around with me. His poems have a brick-like quality too, solid, dense, formidable, part of some great construct, something you want to hurl. Approaching this voluminous Collected has been quite a challenge, too, like trying to gain access to a fortress. There are some lovely poems to be found inside, if the reader does not tire before finding them.
although i don't really love everything that ted hughes wrote, the things that strike me are like rip tides. his metamorphosis is stark, chilling, erotic. i like hughes best when he is relating a strong emotion rather than a strong description.
A great collection of his poems - disturbingly dark, full of pieces that show a fascination with death, nature, and the harshness of the natural world. A pity Daniel Craig didn't really do him justice in 'Sylvia'.....
don't listen to those who tell you Plath was better. Hughes was the ultimate poet of the duo, and of his time. OK, he had a harsh personality, but we're supposed to judge the work, not the person.
my mom had me sort through books i had left at their house over the past years during my last visit home. i came across this and have been savoring it like chocolates each night.
Plath's estranged husband and hated by the feminist world, but an amazing poet. I may even like him better than Plath herself had she never written Ariel.
I like Ted
but he's dead
nevertheless
this book is well read
This is why I am not a poet!
but he's dead
nevertheless
this book is well read
This is why I am not a poet!
I couldn't get into Hughes, but still think he's worth reading.
Manly poems, good poems.
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Edward James Hughes was an English poet and children's writer, known as Ted Hughes. His 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...more
More about Ted Hughes...
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...more
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