Ted Hughes Quotes

“But we know for sure that the whole course of Ted Hughes’s future life was decided by his flight from Sylvia Plath and Court Green in 1962.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia had become a feminist icon because nobody before her, no woman before her, Had emptied her whole soul of its rage Against all that had suppressed and denied her, Against all that had shut her from the life She had wanted for herself, from her freedom.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“In his reserved, understated manner, he was making a profound expression of the undying nature of love – of his love and respect and sorrow for the brilliant and tormented poet-wife of his youth. In his words to me, as in the poems he was even then writing, he was seeking a resolution to his own and their children’s loss and grief, some way of coming to terms with his beloved’s abrupt, irreversible departure – from him, from her children, from herself. He seemed to seek no less than a reconciliation across the very boundary between life and death.32”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“his theory of poetry as ‘the psychological component of the auto-immune system’:”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“who accordingly developed a new kind of poetry of survival which succeeded in yoking the suffering of the mid-century generation to ‘their inner creative transcendence of it’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“One death ‘infects another’, he wrote in his journal account of the terrible day.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“She had always been conscious that her body was not nearly so beautiful as her ravishing face; now she felt that she was losing her looks altogether,”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“That I should be supplanted (sub-planted!) by others. I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will nor huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Late in life, he became a supporter of her Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which fostered the arcane spiritual traditions and also won the support of Prince Charles. Hughes”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“of Hughes’s fortitude that he kept cool and saw the funny side.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“to be kept of every expense and bill’, general acceptance of his friends, no ‘foolish battles over interior design’ (which was to say, don’t remove every last trace of Sylvia’s taste), 8 a.m. as ‘getting up time, no dressing gown mornings, no sleep during day unless emergency, and by agreement’.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“At the planning stage, he had suggested to Brook that a female figure should appear in the position of a ‘Sheila-na-gig’, a kind of ancient Irish stone carving of a woman with her knees more or less over her shoulders and her fingers pulling wide ‘a very large cunt’. The Irish name, he explained, meant ‘Woman of the Tits’. The giant phallus could perhaps, he thought, go up into the woman and then be seen on a ‘sort of spider’s web of veins, like the drapery of the placenta’.50”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Ted, who regarded Taylor as the sexiest woman on the planet, was furious.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Didn’t dreams have the same function? And poems? Did poetry grow from neurosis but come to fruition as a form of healing? Could poetic experience be ‘the vital, medical operation’? Was it in some sense ‘the correction of God’?”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around. The movie people were”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“dissociation of sensibility’ fractured English culture and society, and that it was the job of the poet to repair it.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“dank water. They felt low, despite the presence of Ted’s name carved on a tree as a token of memory. As rain began to fall, Ted made one token cast himself, which he described as ‘a ceremonial farewell’, and there ‘among the rubbish’ he hooked ‘a huge perch’, one of the biggest he had ever caught: ‘It was very weird, a complete dream.’32 Manor Farm is now a gastropub, the Crookhill estate a golf course, the pond of the pike shrunk by mud and reed. The magic landscape survives only in Hughes’s writings.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath

“His favourite fishing place on the Crookhill estate was a large pond, very deep in places.”
― Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – A Comprehensive Literary Biography by Scholar Jonathan Bate Exploring the Poet Laureate and Sylvia Plath