Widespread shock at death of Ted Hughes, a poet with a `savage gift'

Like a great tree felled, the English poet Ted Hughes has died peacefully at home aged 68. News of his death was announced early yesterday. Although Hughes suffered from cancer for some 18 months, few people were aware of his illness and there was widespread shock at the news.

Hughes won two major literary prizes this year: the £21,000 Whitbread prize for Tales From Ovid, a loose translation of the Roman poet's Metamorphoses, and the £10,000 Forward Poetry Prize earlier this month for Birthday Letters. He did not attend either function, but this was put down to his reputed reclusiveness.

Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930. The saying "the place maketh the man" seemed particularly apt for Hughes, who always gave the impression of seeming most at home both out of cities and out of doors.

The bleakly stark beauty of the Yorkshire landscape in which he grew up was to have a profound impact on his imagination, effectively becoming part of his own interior landscape.

At Cambridge, he switched his degree from English literature, graduating in anthropology instead. After graduating, he worked at a succession of firmly non-academic jobs - night watchman, rose gardener and zoo attendant.

All of these experiences were to re-emerge as poems, one famous example being the raw and powerful image of a caged animal in The Jaguar:

as a jaguar hurrying enraged

through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse . . .

the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear

he spins from the bars, but there's no cage to him.

Writing a reassessment of Hughes's work to date in this newspaper in 1989, the poet John Montague cited him as being in possession of a "savage gift". Hughes himself, in a rare interview with the Guardian, said: "My poems are not about violence but vitality . . . about the split personality of modern man, the one behind the constructed, spoilt part."

In 1957, Hughes published his first collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, to much critical success. Lupercal followed in 1960 and, although there were two children's books in the interim, it was 1967 before his next collection of poems, Wodwo, appeared in 1967. Later books include Crow in 1970, Moortown 1979, and Wolfwatching in 1989.

His seven-year silence in the 1960s is often attributed to his first marriage. In 1956, Hughes met the American Fulbright scholar and fledgling poet Sylvia Plath at a party in Cambridge. They were instantly attracted to each other and married four months later.

The marriage of the poets and their later separation became one of the most notorious literary unions of this century. Plath committed suicide in 1963, leaving two small children, Frieda and Nicholas. She also left a sheaf of poems, Ariel, as well as a novel, The Bell Jar, which were published to huge posthumous acclaim.

For the rest of his life, Hughes was criticised for his role in the breakdown of their marriage and for the handling of his late wife's literary estate. A public expression of this took the form of constant vandalism of Plath's grave at Heptonstall in Yorkshire, with the "Hughes" part of her inscription being regularly defaced.

Controversially, he destroyed a journal Plath had written before her death, rather than place it in an archive to be opened years hence, explaining later that he did not want his children to know what it contained.

Other than that statement, he remained publicly silent on the subject of Sylvia Plath - until the unheralded appearance of Birthday Letters at the beginning of this year. It was described as the publishing sensation of the decade.

Matthew Evan, the chairman of Faber and Faber, explained yesterday: "He wanted Birthday Letters to be published because he knew he was seriously ill. He wanted to publish the work before he died."

The 88 astonishing poems in Birthday Letters were written over a period of 25 years, all but two of them addressed to Sylvia Plath. Seamus Heaney described it as "a book of poems as solid as a sandbagged wall, as miraculous and yet as inevitable within the geology of imagination as a volcanic island. The immediate impression is one of wounded power healing and gathering and showing its back above the depths where it has been biding."

Birthday Letters seems an obvious contender for this year's Whitbread Prize, the shortlist of which will be announced on November 6th. It was not to be his last book, although it will almost certainly be his defining one. The Mermaid's Purse, an illustrated poem for children, will be published by Faber and Faber next April.

Among Hughes's many honours was his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1984. Only this month, he was invested with the insignia of a member of the order of merit by the queen, a special mark of honour awarded to people of exceptional distinction. It was his last appearance in public.

Ted Hughes was a regular visitor to Ireland. In 1962, he came with Plath to Connemara for a holiday, where they visited the poet Richard Murphy and sailed to Inishbofin with him.

"He was a very close friend," a shocked Murphy said yesterday. "I saw him quite recently in London and he didn't speak of illness at all. He was ebullient. There was no diminution in his powers - either poetry or wit. He talked mainly about my work, which was such a generous farewell of him, because in retrospective, of course he must have known."

"We talked on the phone only a fortnight ago," said the painter Barrie Cooke, who illustrated Hughes's book, The Great Irish Pike. "We had been friends since the 1950s. We often went fishing together, which we both loved doing. He was talking about coming over here after Christmas. I just want to see him remembered as a good man."

Heaney, in a statement from Harvard, said simply that he was "grief-stricken at the loss of a great friend".