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    Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
    Unavailable
    Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
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    Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
    Audiobook25 hours

    Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

    Written by Jonathan Bate

    Narrated by Mike Grady

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

    A magisterial life of Ted Hughes – identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness and one of Britain’s most important writers – to be published on National Poetry Day by prize-winning biographer Jonathan Bate.

    Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

    With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

    Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity.

    Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 1, 2015
    ISBN9780008141127
    Author

    Jonathan Bate

    Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare and Ovid (1993); John Clare: A Biography (2003) - winner of the 2004 Hawthornden Prize and the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial prize for biography; The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); and Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2009). He was the editor of the Arden edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus(1995).

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    Reviews for Ted Hughes

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      One of the most exciting voices in young adult fiction, Jenny Valentine succeeds again with this story of a family coping with the death of a child.
    • 5/5
      This was a good case of "never judge a book by its cover". I bypassed this one for a while because the cover just looked too teenage (I'm an adult who just happens to still read a lot of children's/YA fiction). And yet when I did get round to it, I found it completely absorbing. One of those can't-put-it-down books. And I absolutely hadn't guessed the twist at the end!
    • 3/5
      First I should say that I did like the characters and cared about them. That being said, I didn't like much else. The plot varied between being unbelievable (coincidences, etc.) to being way too predictable. Also, the formatting of the dialogue was annoying. I guess I've just read so many books like this that this one doesn't stand out in any way for me, other than the fact they're in London rather than in the US.
    • 5/5
      British teenager Rowan is the glue that is holding her family together after the death of her brother. It's been two years since her brother Jack died, but her sister still writes him letters and her mother remains depressed. Her parents divorce has left Rowan as the caretaker of the family - far more responsibility than a fifteen year-old should have to take on. While this book was written for the teenage crowd, adults will find familiarity with the issues of depression, loss, and first loves.