Ted hughes poet biography

Edward Hadley (Open University, UK) presents a biographical sketch of Ted Hughes.

Born on 17 August 1930, Edward James 'Ted' Hughes would, over the course of his life, produce some of the most important and innovative poetry written in English in the twentieth century.

As a child, Hughes lived with his father, William, his mother, Edith Farrar, and his elder siblings Gerald and Olwyn at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire. Aged seven, he moved to Mexborough where William ran a tobacco shop.

His immediate family would all become involved in Hughes’s poetic career at various points and for different reasons; Hughes drew upon his father’s experiences as a frontline soldier during the First World War to inform some of his finest war-verse; his mother’s voice is registered literally and figuratively in a number of poems, but she is most keenly felt in Remains of Elmet (1979); Gerald Hughes, who emigrated to Australia, is present in a num