【正文】
t explosive new poetic talent of the English postwar era. Poetry specialised, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of the everyday. The poetry of Yorkshireborn Ted Hughes, first published in a book called “The Hawk in the Rain” when he was 27, was unlike anything written by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric, it had a visionary fervour. Its most eyecatching characteristic was Hughes39。s ability to get beneath the skins of animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right, but they were also armorial devices—symbols of the countryside and lifeblood of the earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink. It was not only England that thought so either. Hughes39。s death, which he calls his “big and unmanageable event”. He felt his talent muffled by the perpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publish his own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten. The analysis is raw, pained and ruthlessly selfaware. For all the moral torment, the writing itself has the same rush and vigour that possessed Hughes39。 letters are seldom like that, and Hughes39。s own or other people39。s literary career had him moving from obscurity to fame, and then, in the eyes of many, to lifelong notoriety. These letters are filled with his wrestling with the consequences of being the partprivate, partpublic creature that he became, desperate to devote himself to his writing, and yet subject to endless invasions of his privacy. Hughes is an absorbing and intricate mentator upon his own poetry, even when he is standing back from it and goodhumouredly condemning himself for “its fantasticalia, its pretticisms and its infinite verballifications”. He also believed, from first to last, that poetry had a special place in the education of children. “What kids need”, he wrote in a 1988 letter to the secretary of stat