title: Collected Poems
author:  Ted Hughes 
description: The main details of Hughes's life are well-known: after his National Service with the RAF, the dashing poet marries the brilliant American Sylvia Plath in 1954, and becomes an instant celebrity with the publication of Hawk in the Rain in 1957. While "The Thought-Fox" scampers its way into numberless anthologies, he publishes the poems of Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967), where he treats his own voice as a force of nature, threaded through a violent animism. His wife and his lover die by suicide. He makes a major artistic breakthrough with the widely praised sequence Crow (1971), which draws on his deep knowledge of English folklore, and sacrifices, for a kind of Zarathustrian bluntness, all lingering traces of formalism (though blank verse and ballad would continue to be favored methods). He writes plays and several children's books, and becomes poet laureate in 1984, publishing a surprisingly good book of civic verse, Rain Charm for the Duchy, in 1992. His final volume, Birthday Letters, is a conflicted, front-page-news-making account of his relationship with Plath. This enormous, rewarding compendium contains all of the above as well as numerous poems that were previously uncollected (such as the lovely, Williams-y miniature "Snail" and the long "Scapegoat and Rabies," an indictment of the soldier culture that partly shaped Hughes); the entirety of his acclaimed Tales from Ovid; Hughes's appendices to the books as originally published; and copious bibliographic notes. Hughes is already canonical in Great Britain, and this volume, with its resolutely undomesticated bestiary, will mark out permanent space on the shelves of U.S. readers. <br />Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: SW'. 
  
  Ted Hughes is now widely regarded as the greatest living British poet. From the 
  beginning his main concern has been with the relation between the human and the 
  non-human worlds, or, more recently with the denial ot any such distinction, since 
  “what you find in the outside world is what has escaped from your own inner 
  world”. Thus his animal poems, for example, are both wonderfully accurate 
  observation of real animals and also symbols of deep psychic and spiritual realities. 
  His vision spans the whole range from the blackness of Crow to the celebrations of 
  Season Songs, and, more recently, fuses these extremes in the tragic affirmations of 
  Cave Birds, Gaudete and Moortown. No other modern English poet has been able to 
  tap such energies in the English language. Everything Hughes writes is character¬ 
  ized by the same imaginative reach, courage, honesty, depth of caring and 
  far-sighted intelligence, not only his adult poetry, but his writings for children, his 
  stories, h