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Ted Hughes Quotes
1930–1998 England
Edward James Hughes, OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator and children's writer who for the last 14 years of his life occupied the role of Poet Laureate. He was the husband of Sylvia Plath, who influenced his writing style.
England Academics Novelists Poets Translators Also known as: Edward James Hughes, Hughes, Ted (Edward James), The Iron Man
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32 quotes
Stilled legendary depth:
Lupercal (1960)
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Crow (1970)
Every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time.
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search.
Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity.
Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem — don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer.
The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.
The Iron Man (1968)
Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which.
It took the whole of Creation
Lupercal (1960)
Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry.
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
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