Ted Hughes, a major poet of the second half of the twentieth century, was also a significant author of children’s literature, short stories, plays, and a versatile translator of classic and modern poets and playwrights. Hughes’s oeuvre suggests enormous energy, a prodigious, wide-ranging intelligence, a relatively consistent world view, and a highly complex nature, far from simple to define. His poetry, in the broadest sense, encompasses poems of nature, of precise observation, intensity, and, particularly in the early volumes, a fierce, seemingly undiluted power; and poems structured loosely on a framework of mythology, legends, and/or folk tales, shamanism, and imaginative blending of mythic and contemporary references. And H

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First published 04 October 2004

Citation: Bere, Carol. "Ted Hughes". The Literary Encyclopedia. 4 October 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5137, accessed 9 February 2010.]