ABSTRACT
This is a good generalised summary of two phases of the reputation of Ted Hughes. What it omits is the immediate and forceful impact of the first phase in the 1950s and 1960s. But what it indicates is not just the roller-coaster ride of the cultural status of the writer in his life-time, but the vehemence with which opinions have been expressed about his work that have, somehow, also been about what he stands for as a writer. In 1995 Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Hughes could be forgiven for feeling that, at times, he undergoes the kind of eviscerating inquiry and judgement normally reserved for the dead’ (Sunday Times 5. 3. 1995). It is clear that some critics have felt threatened by the writer’s cultural project, as he came to understand that they always would, since his work was an intervention in the continuing history of tensions in English culture (not just English literature), as his writing about Shakespeare, and later Coleridge, confirmed to him (see Works, p. 80).
