Ted Hughes 

 
early life:- 
 
● Ted Hughes was born to William Henry and Edith Farrow Hughes at 1 Aspinall 
Street, Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire.  
● He was raised on the local farms of the Caldor Valley and on the Pennine Moorland. 
● He had two siblings: Olwyn who was two years older than him and Gerard who was 
ten years older. 
● His father served in WW1, he had two near-death experiences. Firstly, at the Battle 
of Ypres where a bullet was lodged in the paybook in his breast pocket, and secondly 
at Gallipolli where he was one of just seventeen soldiers to survive. 
 
poetical beginnings:- 
 
● Stories of Flanders Fields are what inspired Hughes to write poetry - he went on to 
write a poem about the place. 
● Hughes stated 'my first six years shaped everything', suggesting that poetry had been 
his calling from a very young age. 
● As a child, Hughes loved fishing, swimming, and picnicking with his family. He used to 
think of fishing as a spiritual experience.  
● His parents were not very well off, and this financial instability made it quite strange 
for Hughes to pursue a career in poetry. At the age of seven, Hughes was whisked off 
to Mexborough where his parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop.  
 
school years:- 
 
● Hughes attended Mexborough grammar school where his teachers encouraged him to 
write and even introduced him to poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Elliott. 
However, his true mentor was his sister. 
● In 1948, he won an open exhibition at Pembroke college but chose to get his National 
Service done first (at the time it was mandatory for citizens to do some kind of 
national service). He served from 1949-51 and worked as a ground wireless 
mechanic, his service years were uneventful. 
 ● In 1951, Hughes studied at Pembroke College but felt incredibly creatively suffocated 
- he barely attended his lectures and stopped writing poetry altogether. And so, in his 
third year, he began studying anthropology (the study of humans within past and 
present societies). 
● He soon began writing again and after graduating, he worked a number of odd jobs to 
sustain himself. Most prevalent of which was his job at the London Zoo where he got 
to observe animals more closely and this is something that will reflect in his work.  
 
marriage:- 
 
● Hughes met his wife, Sylvia Plath, at a party in 1956. Plath was an American Poet, 
focusing on very dark and complex forms of poetry, she was studying at Cambridge 
and her work won her multiple awards. The two got married after just four months of 
their first meeting. 
● The initial years of their marriage were blissful. The two were busy working and this 
is where Hughes began gaining serious critical acclaim. He was working as a teacher 
at the University of Massachusetts. He was soon labeled the 'wild poet' for he only 
ever wrote about animals.  
● Their marriage was in shreds after news of Hughes's affair reached Plath. Plath 
suffered from depression and the news only exacerbated this - she soon took her own 
life, leaving Huges to face the backlash. Many felt that Huges's ill-treatment led her 
to suicide.  
● After her death, Hughes wrote two poems about Plath then stopped writing for three 
years.  
● In 1969, Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, took her and their four-year-old daughter's 
life, the same way Plath had done. Many argue that it was because of Hughes's 
ill-treatment.  
● On a brighter note, he was proclaimed Poet Laureate in 1998, aged 68 due to a heart 
attack whilst being treated for colon cancer.  
 
hughes's writing:- 
 
● Hughes had a deep fascination with animals from a very young age, he had grown up 
on a farm and had worked with animals at the London Zoo. he used animals as a 
metaphor for life. 
● In his later work, he began incorporating Celtic folklore which is also related to 
animals. He loved writing about innocent violence, with a special emphasis on the 
 survival of the fittest: animals consume each other to survive, the same way humans 
step over each other to ascend. 
● He also studied astrology and firmly believed in its effects.  
 
bayonet charge:- 
 
● During the First World War, weaponry was not very advanced: it took far too long to 
reload a rifle, and time was a luxury on the battlefield. And so, the soldier would stick 
a blade at the mouth of the rifle and call it a bayonet. A bayonet charge is when the 
soldiers, armed with these bayonets, would jump out of their trenches, run across no 
man's land, and attack the enemy trenches. It was a horrific battle strategy: the 
bloodshed was unimaginable. 
● Inspiration for Bayonet Charge could have stemmed from a number of different 
places: 
○ Hughes's own father had gone to war and had a number of near-death 
experiences (ie. at Gallipolli where he was one of just seventeen men to 
survive, at the Battle of Ypres where a bullet was lodged in the paybook in his 
breast pocket)  
○ Hughes's father was emotionally paralyzed after the war - and so the impacts 
of war resonated with him through his father. 
○ Hughes felt the entire region of West Yorkshire was in mourning after the war 
due to the huge casualties they faced.  
○ Hughes admired Wilfred Owen's poetry, he felt that he could feel what his 
father had experienced through Owen's poems.  
● He wrote Bayonet Charge as part of his book 'The Hawk in The Rain', released in 
1957 which had won the Somerset Maugham Award. This was during the blissful 
years of his marriage, he was working as a teacher at the University of Massachusetts.