ABSTRACT
Ted Hughes first book, The Hawk in the Rain, has been a prolific, fascinating and often bewildering poet. His marriage to, influence on, break with, and continuing and troubled executory relationship with Sylvia Plath have played a significant part. So has his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1984, when Philip Larkin turned down the invitation. Ted Hughes has allowed himself to be so attached. Even in his slighter productions, such as his Flowers Mid Insects, the publisher stated in the blurb, presumably approved by Hughes, that the poems were 'no more mere 'nature poetry' than the work of his predecessors in the English tradition, such as-Blake and Lawrence'. The first, 'Moortown' itself, includes some of Hughes's finest poems, its material relating to that of Season Songs. Hughes's work is inextricably linked with that of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath's posthumously published Ariel is the crucial collection, now fully augmented and placed in its context in the Collected Poems.
