|
TEXT 2 He emerged,all of a sudden, in 1957: the most explosive new poetic talent of the Englishpost-war era. Poetry specialised, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of theeveryday. The poetry of Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes, first published in a bookcalled The Hawk in the Rain when he was 27, was unlike anythingwritten by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric,it had a visionary fervour. Its most eye-catching characteristic was Hughess ability to get beneath the skinsof animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right,but they were also armorial devices-symbols of the countryside and lifeblood ofthe earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink. It was notonly England that thought so either. Hughess book was also published inAmerica, where it won the Galbraith prize, a major literary award. But then, in1963, Sylvia Plath, a young American poet whom he had first met at CambridgeUniversity in 1956, and who became his wife in the summer of that year,committed suicide. Hughes was vilified for long after that, especially byfeminists in America. In 1998, the year he died, Hughes broke his ownself-imposed public silence about their relationship in a book of loose-weavepoems called Birthday Letters .In this new and exhilaratingcollection of real letters, Hughes returns to the issue of his first wifes death, which he calls his big and unmanageable event . He felt his talent muffled by theperpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publishhis own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten. | 
