welcome back to the deep dive today we are standing
at the edge of a very steep very jagged cliff
looking down into the life of a giant and i don't
use that word lightly we're talking about a man
who um physically and metaphorically just loomed
over the entire landscape of 20th century literature.
We are talking about Edward James Hughes. Ted
Hughes. Better known to the world of course as
Ted Hughes. A literary titan. I mean there really
isn't another word for it is there? He is a figure
who casts this shadow that's so long and so complex
that it touches almost every corner of modern
English poetry. You just can't walk through the
library of the last 50 years without bumping
into him. You really can't. We're talking about
a man who was poet laureate to Queen Elizabeth
II, a man who the critics, and you and I have
a massive stack of them in our notes today. A
mountain of them. Frequently ranked as one of
the very best poets of his generation. Some even
say one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
We'll stop. And there is always this huge heavy
but when you bring up the name Ted Hughes, he
had it. He is a man whose name is practically
impossible to say without immediately thinking
of someone else. Sylvia Plath. Right. It's this
dual legacy, isn't it? That's the hook that grabs
everyone, whether they read poetry or not. It's
the thing that turns a literary biography into,
well, into a tabloid sensation. It does. On one
hand, you have this poet of the wild. The man
who saw nature as this brutal, beautiful battleground,
a place of, you know, tooth and claw. And on
the other hand, you have the husband, the man
inextricably linked in the public imagination
to the suicide of his first wife, who just happens
to be one of the most beloved, analyzed and dissected
poets of all time. And that creates a tension
that just dominates almost every single discussion
about him. You really can't escape it. You have
the work, which is. It's undeniable. It's energetic.
It's violent. It's primal. It physically impacts
you when you read it. It's like being hit by
a gust of wind or a handful of wet earth. Yeah.
And then you have the life, which was marked
by just extreme tragedy. frankly, intense public
vilification. He was a man who spent his career
trying to capture the raw energy of animals,
of the wind, of the moors. But in the public
imagination, he became this character in a tragedy
he couldn't control. He became a villain to some,
a tragic figure to others, and a mystery to almost
everyone. And that's our mission today, really.
We've got this massive stack of sources here
to help us navigate this. We've got biography
details, literary criticism that breaks down
his meter and his myths. We've got information
on the archives held at the British Library and
Emory University, which contain thousands of
letters and drafts. And we have the grim accounts
of his controversial tenure as the executor of
Plath's estate. Exactly. It's a complex web of
sources because his life was a complex web of
events. I mean, there's very little middle ground
in the source material we've been looking at.
People tend to either revere him as this sort
of shamanistic genius or revile him as a patriarchal
monster. And we want to try to look past that,
past the tabloid sensation. It's just so easy
to get stuck on the gossip, the he said, she
said of the 1960s, the feminist backlash, the
movies. But we want to understand the writer
and the man. We're exploring how his childhood
in Yorkshire, his fascination with shamanism,
and yes, those personal tragedies forged a poetic
voice that was brutal, energetic, and just. Yeah.
Completely distinct. Right. We want to understand
the genesis of poems like Like the Thought Fox,
which is just a master class in creativity. We
want to understand the controversy of the burned
journals. I mean, why would a writer who knows
the value of words better than anyone destroy
writing? Such a huge question. It is. And we
want to understand the silence he kept for decades,
a silence he finally broke with birthday letters
just before he died. It is a heavy task, but
a necessary one, I think. So let's start at the
very beginning. To understand Hughes, you have
to understand the landscape that made him. You
just can't separate the man from the mud. You
have to go to the cradle of the Moors. Mithelmroid.
Mithelmroid, West Riding of Yorkshire. He was
born there on August 17, 1930. One Aspinall Street.
Just the sound of that place named Mithelmroid.
It sounds like something out of a saga, doesn't
it? It really does. It sounds hard. It has this
heaviness to it, like a stone dropping in water.
And it was. I mean, he was raised among the local
farms of the Calder Valley and on a Pennine moorland.
This isn't the rolling, gentle, green English
countryside of a Jane Austen novel where people
have picnics on the lawn and discuss marriage
prospects over tea. No, not at all. This is rugged
country. It's industrial and agricultural caught
in this very specific. Gritty intersection. You
have the high, wild moors on one side, and then
the soot -stained factories down in the valley.
Stark, it feels like a place where you have to
fight to exist. It is. And Hughes claimed his
first six years shaped everything. That's such
a strong statement for a writer to make, that
the die was cast before he was even seven years
old. He grew up amidst the harsh realities of
working farms. He saw the cycle of life and death
every single day. Nature wasn't a pastoral idol
for him. It wasn't about cute lambs frolicking
in a field. It was a place of survival. It was
mud, blood, and struggle. It was elemental. So
you have this little boy running around this
harsh landscape, but there's another shadow hanging
over this household, wasn't there? A shadow from
a little further away. The First World War. Yeah,
and I think this is a detail that gets overlooked
a lot when people talk about Hughes because the
Plath drama just overshadows everything. But
his father... William Henry Hughes was a veteran.
A survivor, really. And that word survivor carries
so much weight here. It's not just that he came
back. It's that he came back when almost everyone
else didn't. Right. William Henry Hughes was
a joiner of Irish descent. But during the Great
War, he enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
He fought at Ypres. Ypres. I mean, that's synonymous
with the absolute horror of trench warfare, gas
attacks, mud, total destruction. That is the
definition of hell on earth for that generation.
It is. And he was one of only 17 men from his
regiment to return from the Dardanelles campaign.
17. Just 17. Imagine the ghostliness of that,
being one of the few who made it back to your
hometown when an entire generation of your neighbors
just... Didn't. You walk down the street and
every house you pass has a black ribbon on the
door except yours. That is a staggering statistic.
It almost feels statistically impossible. It
does. And there's this incredible story, this
almost miraculous anecdote that Hughes grew up
hearing about his father. We call it the paybook
story. Oh, I love this detail. It's the kind
of family myth that becomes foundational for
a child, isn't it? The kind of story that gets
told at every Christmas until it just feels like
a legend. Lay it out for us. So his father was
in the thick of it. The bullets are flying. The
chaos is absolute. And at one point, he was hit.
A bullet struck him directly in the chest. Which
should be the end of the story. A chest wound
in World War I was usually a death sentence.
It should be. But he had his paybook. You know,
the little thick booklet soldiers carried that
recorded their payments identification in his
breath pocket. The bullet hit the book and lodged
in it. It didn't penetrate his heart. That little
book literally saved his life. That's cinematic.
It's like something out of a movie, but it was
real life for his father. I mean, if he had moved
that book to his pants pocket, Ted Hughes never
exists. Exactly. But think about the psychological
weight of that on a child. Hughes's imagination
was just filled with these stories of Flanders
Fields. He describes it later in his poem, Out.
Before he even began writing, his internal world
was populated by death and survival. He was living
in the aftermath of a massacre, essentially.
He knew that his very existence depended on a
thick booklet in a pocket stopping a piece of
lead. That creates a very specific view of fate
and chance. It makes the line between life and
death feel incredibly thin. It makes life feel
fragile. It makes death feel like a constant
neighbor, someone who lives just next door. Exactly.
He absorbed the silence of his father, the trauma
that hung in the house. It wasn't spoken about
constantly, but it was there. The no man's land
wasn't just in France, it was in the living room.
It was in the long pauses at the dinner table.
And that theme of survival, of life and death
being right next to each other, seems to just
bleed into his hobbies, too. He wasn't just sitting
around reading nursery rhymes. He was up there
in the muck. He was a hunter. He loved fishing,
swimming, picnicking with the family. But specifically,
he was fascinated by capturing things. Capturing.
That's a key word for him. It is. In his book
Poetry in the Making, he recalled being fascinated
by animals. He collected and drew toy -led creatures.
But it went beyond toys. His older brother, Gerald,
was a gamekeeper. Right. Now, a gamekeeper isn't
an animal rights activist. A gamekeeper manages
the land for hunting. So Ted was literally the
retriever. Yes. When Gerald shot magpies, owls,
rats, curlews, Ted would go get them. He was
handling the dead bodies of these animals from
a very young age. He wasn't shielded from the
violence of the natural world. He was a participant
in it. He knew the weight of a dead bird. He
knew the smell of it. He knew what his eyes looked
like when the light went out of them. There's
a progression here that I find fascinating, and
it's crucial to understanding his art. He starts
by capturing animals, physically hunting them,
retrieving them, and then over time, that impulse
shifts. It shifts to poetry. This is the evolution
of capturing. Right, from the physical to the
metaphorical. And this is key to understanding
his entire poetic philosophy. He realized that
capturing a metaphorical animal in a poem was
actually better, more potent than killing a real
one. How so? Well, when you kill a fox, it's
dead. It's static. It decomposes. It loses its
spirit. But if you capture it in a poem, it lives
forever. It has a permanent energy. It can be
released into the reader's mind over and over
and over again. This leads us directly to the
thought fox, doesn't it? It does. This is arguably
his most famous. Early poem. It was written later,
when he was in London, but it's a vivid recollection
of that Yorkshire landscape. The setting is intimate.
He's sitting alone at night trying to write.
The window is starless. The clock is ticking.
The page is blank. And then he senses something.
He imagines or summons a fox. Cold delicately
is the dark snow. I love that imagery. Dark snow.
It's so contradictory, but so evocative. It makes
you feel the cold. The fox moves through the
darkness, through the snow, touching twig and
leaf. It's wary. It's a lame shadow. But it's
coming closer. And eventually, with a sudden
sharp hot stink of fox, it enters the dark hole
of the head. And the poem ends with that line.
The page is printed. I get chills every time
I read that. It's like the act of writing is
a shamanistic summons. He's calling the spirit
of the animal into his mind. The fox isn't just
a subject he's looking at. It's a force that
enters him. It's possession. He has captured
the fox without hurting it, and now it lives
on the page. And that's the aha moment regarding
his creative process. He's not describing the
fox, he's manifesting it. This connects to his
love of fishing, too. Hughes viewed fishing as
an almost religious experience. He did. He learned
a lot about wildlife from a friend's father,
a gamekeeper at the Crick Hill Estate. But fishing?
Fishing was special. It wasn't just a sport for
Hughes. It was a connection to the primal world
beneath the surface. You cast a line into the
dark water. the unconscious, and you wait to
see what live thrashing thing you can pull up
into the air. That's exactly how he approached
poetry. The poem is the fish, the mind is the
water. You have to be patient, you have to be
quiet, and you have to be ready to wrestle with
whatever bites. So you have this boy from the
Moors, obsessed with animals and death, deeply
connected to the land, and then he goes off to
university, and not just any university, Cambridge.
Pembroke College, Cambridge. He won an open exhibition
in English. This was a big deal for a boy from
his background. That feels like a bit of a culture
clash, doesn't it? The wild boy of Yorkshire
meets the ivory tower, the tweed jackets, and
the sherry parties. And he felt it. He did his
national service first, in the RAF, where he
spent a lot of time reading Shakespeare and watching
grass grow in East Yorkshire. Literally. Literally.
He was a ground wireless mechanic in an isolated
spot, which gave him plenty of time to read.
But when he got to Cambridge in 1951 to study
English, The reality set in. He hated it. He
felt stifled. He famously described literary
academia as a terrible, suffocating maternal
octopus. Maternal octopus. That is quite the
image. Sticky, clinging, dragging you down. It
is. He felt that the academic dissection of texts
The Leavis -style dismantling, as it was called
then, named after the famous critic F .R. Leavis,
who dominated Cambridge English at the time,
was destroying his creative impulse. Right. He
said he had a talent for it, even a sadistic
streak for dismantling texts. But he realized
it was a foolish game that was deeply destructive
to himself. He felt like he was killing the poetry
by analyzing it to death. He was dissecting the
animal instead of letting it live. So he made
a move, a pivot. He didn't drop out, but he changed
lanes. In his third year, he transferred. He
switched his major to anthropology and archaeology.
Okay, let's unpack this. Why is that switch so
important for the listener to understand? Why
does it matter that he studied bones and tribes
instead of sonnets? Because it moved him away
from the polite, genteel tradition of English
literature. You know, the drawing rooms and the
social manners and toward folklore, shamanism
and myths. He started reading about totems, about
ancient cultures, about how tribal societies
viewed the spirit world. This is where he gets
the tools to build his later mythology. He's
not trying to be a polite English gentleman poet.
He's trying to tap into something older, something
closer to the bone. He's learning how shamans
and other cultures interacted with the spirit
world. He's trading Jane Austen for the witch
doctor. Effectively, yes. And that education
gave him a completely different framework than
his peers. While they were worrying about rhyme
schemes, he was worrying about how to summon
rain. And it's while he's at Cambridge, amidst
this intellectual rebellion, that the most significant
meeting of his life happens. February 25th, 1956.
The launch party for the St. Bothol's Review.
This is a legendary night in literary history.
The kind of night biographers dream about. It
is. Hughes had four poems in this review. He
was there with his friends, celebrating. And
enter Sylvia Plath. She was there on a Fulbright
scholarship. Right. She was studying at Newnham
College, Cambridge. But she wasn't just a student.
She was already an accomplished writer. She had
published extensively in the U .S., won multiple
awards. And she went to that party specifically
to meet Hughes. Oh, really? She'd read his work
in the review. She recognized the power in it.
She wanted to know the man behind those poems.
She hunted him down. In a way. And the interaction
was electric. It was instant, intense, mutual
attraction. There are accounts of this meeting.
Plath wrote about it in her journals. It was
physical. It was loud. It was violent in its
intensity. Violent. She bit him on the cheek,
drawing blood. She bit him. Yes. It was a mark
of ownership or recognition. It wasn't a polite
handshake. It was two predators meeting in the
wild. It set the tone for everything that followed.
It was passion, but it was a dangerous kind of
passion. We hear so much about the end of their
relationship, but the beginning sounds like a
whirlwind romance. It was incredibly fast. They
met in late February. They didn't meet again
for a month. But then, on June 16, 1956, just
four months after that first meeting, They were
married. June 16, Bloomsday. Exactly. In honor
of the Irish writer James Joyce and his novel
Ulysses, that tells you everything about how
seriously they took literature. It wasn't just
a job. It was their religion. They married on
the day celebrating literature. Plath's mother
was the only guest at the wedding. And in those
early days, it wasn't a tragedy. It was a partnership.
I think people forget that. It was a period of
avid mutual support. We have to remember that.
It wasn't all doom and gloom from the start.
They lived in Cambridge, then America. They were
both writing furiously. Plath typed his manuscripts.
In fact, she submitted his collection, The Hawk
in the Rain, to a competition run by the Poetry
Center in New York. She did. So she was instrumental
in his first big break. Absolutely. She believed
in his genius. She was his biggest champion.
The prize was publication by Harper. It won.
And it gained widespread critical acclaim. He
won a Somerset Maugham Award. Suddenly, Hughes
wasn't just a student with potential. He was
a star. And the critics noticed something different
about him immediately, didn't they? It goes back
to that sound we talked about. They did. They
noted his style was distinct. At the time, there
was a movement called The Movement. Very rational,
ironic, understated poetry. Philip Larkin was
the face of it. It was very English, very contained.
Hughes blew that out of the water. While others
were using genteel, latinate sounds. Words derived
from Latin. Very flowery, very smooth, very intellectual.
Hughes was using hard -hitting trochees and spondees.
Prochees and spondees. Okay, for those of us
who haven't brushed up on our poetic meter lately,
what does that actually sound like? Think of
a drum. It sounds like Middle English. It sounds
like Beowulf. It's percussive. A trochee is a
stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one.
D -U -M -D -A. A spondee is two stressed syllables.
D -U -M -D -U -N -D -A. So instead of a flowing
river, it sounds like rocks banging together.
Bam, bam, bam, bam. It felt ancient and modern
at the same time. It cut through the politeness
of 1950s poetry like a knife. It sounded like
the Yorkshire Moors. It's the sound of boots
sucking out of the mud. Exactly. It's physical
language. It's language that has weight. So they
are the golden couple. They move to America,
where he teaches at UMass Amherst. They meet
the artist Leonard Baskin, who becomes a lifelong
collaborator. Then they come back to England
in 1959. They have children, Frida and Nicholas.
They buy a house in Devon, Court Green, in 1961.
It sounds perfect. On the surface. But we know
now. from biographies and later from birthday
letters, that there were chasms of difference
between them. Plath had a history of depression
and suicide attempts that she didn't fully reveal
to him until later. Her mental health was precarious,
but they were trying. They were building a life,
planting a garden, raising children. And then
came 1962, the summer of 1962. This is where
the story turns. This is the beginning of the
tragedy. Hughes begins an affair. With Asia Weevil.
She had been subletting their London flat with
her husband, David Weevil, who was also a poet.
It's a tangled web. Asia was charismatic, beautiful,
and worldly. The affair was the catalyst. It
shattered the domestic life they had built. Under
the cloud of this affair, Plath and Hughes separated
in the autumn of 1962. And this leads to that
terrible winter. One of the coldest winters in
British history. The big freeze of 1963. The
snow was feet deep. Plath moves back to London
with the two children, Frida and Nicholas. The
pipes are freezing. There's severe frost. She's
isolated. It was a brutal time physically and
emotionally. She was writing the aerial poems
at this time, waking up at 4 a .m. to write before
the kids woke up. It was a creative explosion
fueled by rage and sorrow. And on February 11,
1963, Plath takes her own life. She places her
head in a gas oven while her children are asleep
in the next room. She had carefully taped up
the door to their room to protect him from the
gas, leaving mugs of milk and bread for them.
Where was Hughes? He was in London. But he wasn't
with her. He was with his lover at the time,
Susan Alliston. That detail, knowing he was with
someone else while this was happening, it adds
such a layer of guilt to the narrative. And Hughes
was devastated. Yeah. To be clear about that.
Whatever the state of their marriage, this was
a cataclysmic event for him. He wrote poems like
The Howling of Wolves and Song of a Rat immediately
after expressing this raw animal grief. And then
he went silent. Right. Poetically silent for
three years. He focused on broadcasting, essays,
reviews, anything but his own poetry. He couldn't
access that part of himself. But silence in his
poetry didn't mean silence in the public sphere.
Because now he had a new role. He wasn't just
the grieving husband. He was the literary executor.
And this is where the controversy really ignites.
This is what defines the next 30 years of his
life. As her widower, he controlled her estate.
He controlled her words. He owned the copyright
to her genius. And he made some choices that
people are still angry about today. He oversaw
the posthumous publication of her manuscripts,
including Ariel in 1965. This is the book that
made her a legend. But he edited it. He changed
the order of the poems from what she had intended.
How so? She ended her manuscript with a note
of hope, with bees flying in spring. He ended
his version with death. And he left poems out.
He did. He omitted poems like The Jailer and
The Rabbit Catcher. These are powerful poems.
Well, those poems depicted themes of domestic
abuse and rape. They were incredibly harsh. arguably
directed at him. His defense later was that they
were personally aggressive. He said he omitted
them to protect the children. He didn't want
them growing up reading their mother describing
their father as a jailer. He felt a duty to his
children that superseded his duty to literature.
But to the feminist critics emerging in the late
60s and 70s. To them, this looked like censorship.
It looked like the patriarch silencing the woman
even after death. It looked like he was trying
to curate her legacy to protect his own reputation.
They felt he was sanitizing her anger to make
himself look better. And then there's the journal.
The infamous burned journal. Yes. This is the
hardest one for scholars to swallow. Hughes admitted
to destroying Plath's final journal. The one
that detailed their last few months together.
The maroon -backed ledger. He burned it. destroyed
it. He claimed he did it to protect their children,
Frida and Nicholas. He didn't want them to ever
read the painful details of that time, the breakdown
of the marriage, the despair. But later, in a
letter to The Guardian in 1989, he said something
fascinating. He wrote, The fantasia about Sylvia
Plath is more needed than the facts. That is
a loaded statement. The fantasia is more needed
than the facts. It suggests he felt the public
had already created a myth, the fantasy of St.
Sylvia and the demon Ted, and the messy truth,
which might have been even more painful or complex,
wasn't worth preserving in the face of that overwhelming
desire for a story. He felt he couldn't compete
with the myth. Exactly. But to historians, destroying
the final words of a genius is considered a cardinal
sin. It's burning history. And the backlash was
fierce. Fierce is an understatement. It was vitriolic.
Activists claimed he murdered her. They would
show up at his readings chanting murderer. It
was a trial by public opinion and he had no defense.
There was that poem by Robin Morgan, right? Arraignment.
It accused him directly. It linked him to the
battery and rape themes in Plath's work. Hughes
actually threatened to sue for libel and the
poem was suppressed in some editions. But the
sentiment was out there. He was the villain of
the story. It got so bad that people would travel
to Plath's grave in Hepton's stall. And vandalize
it. They would chisel the name Hughes off the
gravestone, repeatedly, leaving only Sylvia Plath.
They wanted to erase him from her history, just
as they felt he had tried to erase parts of her
work. It became a battleground. He would have
the stone repaired, and they would deface it
again. It's a war over memory. A war over who
owns the narrative. And then, as if this story
couldn't get any darker, history repeats itself.
1969, six years after Plath. Is you evil. The
woman Hughes left Plath for. They had stayed
together, on and off. They had a daughter together
named Shura. On March 23, 1969, Aisha Weevil
took her own life. And the method? Gas asphyxiation.
The same way Plath died. But even more tragically,
she killed her daughter Shura as well. She gave
the child sleeping pills and turned on the gas.
That is horrific. It is unspeakable. And for
the public, this cemented the narrative. Hughes
wasn't just a bad husband. He was seen as a destructive
force, a blue beard figure, two women, dead by
the same method in his orbit. It seemed to confirm
the darkest suspicions about him that he was
a man who destroyed the woman who loved him.
So how do you write poetry after that? I mean,
how do you create art when your life has become
this gothic horror story? You reinvent the universe.
You create Crow. Crow. This is one of his most
famous and most divisive works. It came out in
1970 right in the shadow of all this death. Crow
is unlike anything else in English poetry. It's
a cosmology. It was written during his relationship
with Weevil and published after her death. It
is dedicated to the memory of Aisha and Shura.
Crow is a character. A trickster, a survivor,
an alter ego. It's not a nice bird. No. It's
apocalyptic. It's bitter. It's cynical. Well.
But it's also weirdly childlike. There's a specific
poem, Crow Blacker Than Ever, that captures this
perfectly. Do you have it there? I do. Listen
to this imagery. When God, disgusted with man,
turned towards heaven, and man, disgusted with
God, turned towards Eve, things look like falling
apart. But Crow... Crow nailed them together,
nailing heaven and earth together. So man cried,
but with God's voice. And God bled, but with
man's blood. Exactly. Crow grinned, crying, this
is my creation, flying the black flag of himself.
Wow. It's like he's saying the universe is broken,
God is bleeding, and this ugly black bird is
the only thing holding it together with a rusty
nail. That's it. He moved away from standard
nature poetry into something much darker, a surreal,
totemic cosmology. He was trying to find a myth
that could contain the violence he had experienced.
He couldn't write pretty poems about flowers
anymore. He needed a monster to explain the world.
He needed a survivor who could eat anything,
endure anything. That was Crow. And this brings
us back to his view of nature in general. We
talked about the moors earlier. But Hughes's
animals, the hawk, the jaguar, the crow, they
aren't cute. They aren't Disney characters. They
are absolutely not cute. They are Darwinian.
Look at hawk roosting. The poem is written from
the hawk's point of view. It's arrogant. The
hawk says, I kill where I please because it is
all mine. It says, there's no sophistry in my
body. My manners are tearing off heads. Tearing
off heads. It's pure power. No morality. It is.
Hughes believed that we, as modern humans, suffer
from a dualistic split in our psyche. We separate
ourselves from our animal nature. We pretend
we aren't violent. We pretend we aren't driven
by instinct. His goal with these poems wasn't
just to describe a bird. It was to heal that
split, to force us to look at the violence and
beauty of the world without flinching. To accept
the hawk inside us. Exactly. Because if we deny
it, it comes out in other worse ways like war.
But here is the paradox of Ted Hughes. He wasn't
just writing nightmares, he was also writing
for children. And this is a side of Hughes that
people often forget, or they don't connect it
to the tragedy, the Iron Man. Yes, or the Iron
Giant, as movie fans might know it from the animated
film. I grew up watching that movie. I had no
idea it was written by Ted Hughes until much
later. And the origin of that story is heartbreaking.
He wrote it specifically to comfort his children,
Frida and Nicholas, after their mother's suicide.
Really? Yes. Think about the story. It's about
a giant who is broken apart. He falls off a cliff
and shatters. And he has to pull himself back
together piece by piece. An ear here, a hand
there. Right. It's about a monster finding a
place in the world. It's a story of reconstruction
and healing. It stands in such stark contrast
to Crow. It shows his range. He could channel
that darkness, but he could also offer this incredible
tenderness and hope for his children. He was
trying to give them a myth of survival, a way
to put themselves back together. And he didn't
stop there with children. He served as the president
of the charity farms for city children, established
by his friend Michael Morpurgo. What was the
goal there? He wanted kids from the city to experience
the mud and the reality of the farm, just like
he did in Mithomroid. He believed the connection
to the land was vital for the human soul. He
didn't want nature to be an abstract concept
for them. He wanted them to get their hands dirty.
So we move into the later years. He has remarried
to Carol Orchard in 1970, a nurse. They stay
together until the end, finding a stability he
lacked before. And then in 1984, the establishment
calls. The Poet Laureate. He succeeds John Betjeman,
but he wasn't the first choice, was he? No, Philip
Larkin was the preferred nominee. Larkin is another
giant of British poetry, famous for his glum,
witty verse. But Larkin declined. He had writer's
block, his health was failing, and he felt he
had lost his creative momentum. He famously said
he wouldn't be any good at it, so Hughes took
the mantle. It seems like an odd fit. The wild
man of the Moors, the shaman, the man with the
scandalous past, writing poems for the queen.
It was a bit awkward. He wrote poems for royal
occasions, collected in rain charm for the duchy.
They aren't generally considered his best work.
It's hard to bring that raw crow energy to a
royal wedding or a christening. You can't exactly
write about tearing off heads at a royal baptism.
You really can't. But he took the role seriously.
He used the platform to advocate for things he
cared about. Particularly river conservation.
The fishing. Again, it always comes back to the
water. In 1994, alarmed by the decline of fish
and rivers local to his Devonshire home, he became
a founding trustee of the West Country Rivers
Trust. He wasn't just a figurehead. No, he was
active. He saw the decline of fish populations
as a sign of environmental collapse. He understood
that if the rivers are dying, the land is dying.
He was an environmentalist deeply connected to
the local ecosystem long before it was a mainstream
celebrity cause. But while he was being the laureate,
he was also diving deep into the esoteric. He
wrote this massive prose work called Shakespeare
and the Goddess of Complete Being. 1992. This
book, well, it had a mixed reception. He was
obsessed with Robert Graves as the white goddess.
He believed there was this single overarching
mythic structure to all great poetry, the great
goddess, the cycle of birth and death. And he
tried to apply that to Shakespeare's entire canon.
That sounds ambitious. It was monumental. Some
people thought it was an important original appreciation.
Others dismissed it as idiosyncratic. Basically,
Hughes projecting his own shamanistic belief
system onto Shakespeare. And Hughes himself thought
writing it hurt him. He did. He later suggested
that the time spent writing that prose, that
analytical heavy prose, was directly responsible
for a decline in his health. He believed that
writing poetry released energy, but writing prose
consumed it. He felt he had exhausted his vital
force on that book. And then in 1998, just months
before his death, he drops a bomb. Birthday letters.
After 35 years of silence, after refusing to
discuss Plath, after burning the journal, after
the grave vandalism, he publishes a collection
explicitly addressing their relationship. It
was a literary sensation. I mean, you have to
understand, people had been waiting for this
for decades. They assumed he would never speak.
And suddenly here it was. It wasn't defensive.
It wasn't angry. It was tender. It won the Whitbread
Prize. It did. It's a conversation with her ghost.
He addresses her directly as you throughout the
book. He revisits their meeting, their marriage,
the tragedy. He admits his own bewilderment.
He describes the chasms between them. It was
his way of reclaiming the narrative, not by fighting
the critics, but by speaking to her. It broke
the dam. And there is even one more poem discovered
much later. Last letter. Discovered in the British
Library Archives in 2010, it details the three
days leading up to her suicide. What does it
say? It describes what happened. The frantic
driving between London and Devon. The confusion.
The moment of the news. Carol Ann Duffy, the
poet laureate at the time, called it his darkest
poem. She said it was almost unbearable to read.
It shows that he was replaying those final moments
in his head for his entire life. He never really
escaped that weekend in 1963. It was a wound
that never closed. So let's bring this to a close.
The final days. He was appointed to the Order
of Merit. by Queen Elizabeth II just before he
died. That is the highest honor in the land,
a personal gift from the sovereign. It was the
establishment finally embracing him fully, acknowledging
his greatness despite the controversy. And he
died in 1998. October 28, 1998. He suffered a
fatal heart attack while undergoing treatment
for colon cancer in London. At his funeral, Seamus
Heaney, another Nobel Prize winner, a fellow
poet, and a close friend gave the eulogy. What
did he say? He described Hughes as a tower of
tenderness and strength. He said, by his death,
the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning
broken. A tower of tenderness and strength. That's
beautiful. A contrast so sharply with the monster
image from the tabloids. But the tragedy didn't
end with his death. No. The lingering shadows.
His son, Nicholas Hughes, the little boy who
was sleeping in the next room when Plath died,
the boy for whom The Iron Man was written. What
happened to him? He became a marine biologist.
He moved to Alaska. He studied fish again, the
connection to the water, just like his father.
But he suffered from depression. And in 2009,
he took his own life. It's just... It's too much
tragedy for one family. It feels biblical. It
really is. It's a Grecian tragedy in modern times.
And we should mention Carol Hughes, his widow.
She married him in 1970 and stayed with him until
the end. She defended his name. She broke her
own silence in 2013 to publish a memoir. She
was the one who had to live through the storm
of public hatred alongside him for over 40 years.
So what does this all mean when we look at the
stack of sources, the biography, the poems, the
scandals? What is the takeaway? I think we have
to go back to the thought fox. The fox entering
the dark hole of the head. Hughes spent a lifetime
trying to capture the raw energy of nature. He
wanted to bring the fox, the hawk, the crow onto
the page. He succeeded in that. The page is printed.
His work stands as some of the most powerful
in the English language. But there's a question
that remains. Yes. I wonder if his greatest struggle
wasn't with nature, but with his own narrative.
He tried to capture his own life, his own truth,
in the face of a public that preferred the fantasia.
They wanted the villain. They wanted the monster.
And in birthday letters, he finally tried to
capture the reality of his grief. It's a provocative
thought. Hughes spent his life as the hunter,
capturing animals in verse. But in the end, was
he the one being hunted? Was he the fox and the
public the hounds? That is the question. And
maybe the answer is in the poems. We'll leave
you with that. If you haven't read Crow or Birthday
Letters, go pick them up. Decide for yourself.
Don't just read the headlines. Read the poems.
The page is printed. Thanks for listening to
The Deep Dive. We'll see you next time.