Product Description

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

Customer Reviews (4)

Wonderful Anthology
Ted Hughes always had to do everything his own way, and so his anthology of Shakespeare for this "Essential" series (which is quite good generally) is typically unique. The book is arranged more or less chronologically with passages from the plays juxtaposed with sonnets until the time at which he stopped writing sonnets. There seem to be little currents of thematic connection running through the ordering of selections, which is sometimes intriguing.Hughes decided for no particularly good reason to identify the passages and numbers of the sonnets in an appendix at the end of the book instead of having the titles (and sonnet numbers) atop each passage. The idea was to remove the speeches from their context in the plays so they could sing alone, but this has an odd effect. The speeches in the plays aren't really poems that exist independently the way the sonnets do or the way any other poem, good or bad, does. They are magnificent and the context isn't the most importantaspect but it's certainly relevant. They are all expressions by particular characters in distressful situations, so the nature of the distress and type of character are important. Out of context, they don't always have much validity, they're not universal, self-evident truths. Lady Macbeth's quotes are chilling and magnificent but relate to the experience of wanting to murder or having murdered an important person who's sleeping over, not life in general. So I wish he'd let us know what play and who the speaker was right there on the same page.

Having said that, this is an excellent selection and a useful thing to have. Most of us can't give as much time to Shakespeare as we would like to, seeing or reading the plays, so a work like this that digs out a lot of the great passages is really welcome. And they are wonderful. No one has expressed the real goings on of the psyche with so much clarity and affection as Shakespeare.

Billiantly Well Done
I bought this set of two audio CDs on a lark so I could qualify for free shipping on another item. It has turned out to be the most entertaining audio purchase I made last year. I have a 10-minute drive to work, and I listen to it every day while driving. The scenes are so well acted, the narration so illuminating, the music so appropriate, the audio so clear, and the drama so vivid -- it's no less than Shakespeare at his best -- that you simply cannot listen to it just once. I have easily listened to every scene more than 15 times, and I find something new and priceless every time I repeat the cycle. If you don't have access to live productions of Shakespeare's plays and you're like me and find his works somewhat daunting to read, this audio product is the perfect solution. The actors are consummate pros. My only complaint is that the CD insert gives credit to only four actors. I'm quite sure that I heard more than four, one of whom is surely the narrator, Mary Denham. Anyway, all of the performers shine, as does this product.

More fun than a standard audiobook
This is great entertainment in the car.Shakespeare is a nice break from the standard audiobook.If it has been a while since you last saw some of these plays performed, these scenes will bring it all back to you.The introductions are very nice in setting up the scene.

Essential Shakespeare
As a 3rd Year English Student, I highly reccomend this collection. While I already own the Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, this book I find offers a unique way of reading Shakespeare. Ted Hughes offers a brilliant introduction in which he relates how Shakespeare can be read on two very unique levels. Plays in their entirety, and the way that this book offers selections, exerpted speeches and soliloquies. Taken out of context, the various collected tid-bits stand on their own and allow the reader to absord the text and poetry without being constrained by characterization and plot development, a more abstract quality is given to the works and the texts stand by themselves in a distinct way. Worth picking up, cheers. ... Read more

Product Description
One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. This was the Poet Laureate's fourth book of poems for adults, and represented a significant moment in his writing career. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

A fierce and black black black crow
This is a Hughes signature work. His conveying of the animal fierceness and dark violence of the black, black, blackdeath - driven Crow strikes harshly at the reader. Hughes metaphoric perception and imagination recreation of the crow- mind and world are highly original. But those who desist from Cruelty and its manifestation in words will not truly enjoy this work.

Glad I finally read these poems after 30 years
As an English major in 1973, one of my professors recommended this book of poetry.None of our textbooks contained any of Ted Hughes' work but I jotted his name and this title in the margin of one of my books.After graduating, I spent very little time reading or thinking about poetry.But I recently revived my interest in poetry, specifically after reading several biographies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.I pulled out my old poetry textbooks, found this note and immediately ordered Crow to read it for myself.
What an experience.The work is fantastic - the images, the rhythm, the concept.Amazing, entertaining, and relevant.
I highly recommend this book.

Marvelous poetry focused on the remarkable title character
"Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" is a collection of poems by Ted Hughes.The copyright page notes that the book was first published in 1972.This is a remarkable book that often reads like some apocryphal sacred text.The book is dominated by its title character, who is the focus of a significant number of the poems.Crow is a multifaceted character with mythic heft: he is a warrior, theologian, trickster, and partner with God in creation.He is both heroic and ridiculous, foolish and wise.He's a compelling and delightful character who ultimately transcends all cultures and historical eras.

The collection as a whole is whimsical, witty, apocalyptic, bold, revelatory, irreverent, visceral, horrific, and playful.At times, Hughes' poetic marriage of the earthy and the mystical reminded me of Walt Whitman.The book also calls to mind traditional Native American animal stories.

Many of the poems in "Crow" touch on the magic and power of words.The natural world is another key recurring motif.Hughes delivers some striking images and some interesting arrangements of words on the page--many poems really engage the eye.Many poems read like religious litanies.Overall, an impressive and enjoyable poetic achievement.

Where is my previous review?
...The gist of it was this: Crow is one of the best books of poetry published in the last 50 years...

Awesome!
A brilliant work! Honest, straightforward, raw and hardcore poems
that will knock your socks off.This is the only work I recommend reading by Hughes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Archaeology of the Mouth"
In the prefatory poem that begins "Remains of Elmet", Ted Hughes talks about an "Archaeology of the mouth". For Hughes, this "archaeology" describes a process of excavation and rediscoverywhich is movingly enacted throughout the volume. While this collection isoften labelled as "a book of pretty words and pictures" (which itundoubtedly is, when coupled with Fay Goodwin's extraordinary black andwhite photographs), "Remains of Elmet" also marks a majordeparture in Hughes' work. Whereas its predecessors, "Crow" and"Cave Birds" (and perhaps most extremely, "Orghast"),mark a period of repression and a fleeing from the familiar natural worldwhich was Hughes' first subject (in "The Hawk in the Rain" and"Lupercal"), "Remains of Elmet" can be seen to mark are-embracing of the real world (in this case, the moorlands of Hughes'childhood). The "trauma" at the heart of this poetic (andpsychological) process is the famous suicide of Hughes' wife, the poetSylvia Plath, an event for which Hughes has been repeatedly chastised. Justas Crow represents a pathetic man-figure plagued by unshakeable guilt andpain (Hughes for perhaps twenty years after Plath's death), so the angelthat inhabits the final few poems of "Remains of Elmet" (asymbolic, luminescent Plath) completes the full circle of repression andrecovery,forgetting and remembering, which this volume finally resolves."Remains of Elmet" is not only an important benchmark in Hughes'oeuvre, but also a book of the most haunting poetry one is ever likely toread. In the poems of landscape and childhood - barren moorlands, decayingmonuments, the old and the ancient - Hughes captures the essence of hisYorkshire home and resolves a psychological event that shaped the mostproductive years of his poetic career. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
What has happened to the lost art of memorizing poetry? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English language "by heart"? In his introduction, Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more frequently it is practised. The collected 101 poems are both personal favourites and particularly well-suited to the method Hughes demonstrates. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent poetry anthology
It's clear that the editor, Ted Hughes, gave this selection a good deal of thought. The selection was a search to find poems of suitable length for and worthy of memorization. So the term "by heart" functions both in the sense of knowing by memory and feeling something deeply. Anyway, you will find many poems you will want to know by heart: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone", "There's a certain Slant of light", "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun" for example, excellent works. Lots of Shakespeare and Yeats, Blake and Dickinson. He has also included Hamlet's "To be..." and Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow..."

Now that the internet has replaced individual mental retention, I suppose this book seems anachronistic, which is too bad. The great English poems are among the few mental constructs will have seemed worth preserving in the future. Furthermore, the capability to remember something exactly is a real gift. Memorization is a mental capacity that is being lost, so too the ability to contemplate. The slowing down to contemplate a subject, which poetry invites us to do, is important if there is ever to be an American civilization.Life without it is quite stupid, not to say exhausting.

Having done this for a while, i.e. memorize poems I love, I can testify to the worthiness of it, not for recitation purposes (no one wants to listen), but because it's a way to knowing the work and the poet more intimately and because it becomes part of you. You finally have something good up there.

It's probably good for the brain as well: poor, distracted thing.

Hughes provides hints on memorization in the introduction, which is somewhat useful, but you have to find your own method, make your own memory palace. The selection of poems is excellent. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Does a poet need to know the original language?
A mixed bag of treats from this justly famed poet whose "Tales from Ovid" provided me with such education and delight a decade ago. The best renderings to match those from the Metamorphoses appear from an incomplete mss. giving us "Sir Gawain & the Green Knight," in a freer line that still keeps, thanks to the Yorkshire cadences of its reworker, a strong sense of the alliterative structure and harshly honed cadences of its Northern original. I also liked a sadly scanty attempt at the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for its clarity and calmness in the face of horror. Lorenzo de'Medici's Renaissance celebration of the market and its sumptuous wares offered by and on behalf of women kept its refined innuendo; the attempt at a pre-literate, pure sound language for the Persian performance "Orghast," as if imitating birdsong and primitive speech, also haunted me. The range is vast here, although the heights were reached more rarely. Many of the poems depend upon a modernist presentation of striking images. and the pictorial quality that Hughes appears to have been captivated by, and through which the literal (but not fussy or overly scrupulous) conveying of the original voice mattered more than technical fidelity to a dictionary definition. This pleases Weissbort as much as Hughes. For me, perhaps conscious of my own struggles in language learning, I remain hesitant.

Most of the "translations" of more contemporary poets failed to enchant me. As his editor and one-time colleague Daniel Weissbort explains in helpful notes (and especially the appendices that quote Hughes' own elaboration of his methods), Hughes (akin to Ezra Pound perhaps?) did not work from the original languages in many cases. Hungarian and Russian, unsurprisingly, were not mastered by Hughes as were his Latin, Greek, and Middle English. Even those, for the classics, appear to have depended greatly in initial stages on cribs. For such as Yehuda Amichai's Hebrew or János Pilinszky and Ferenc Juhász''s Magyar verses, the authors provided line-by-line renderings that were-- or in some cases were hardly at all-- refashioned into Hughes' own poetic style. Is this translation as we'd expect it?

Not in the scholarly manner of an editor, steeped in the acquired language or the second tongue as well as the one he knows as a native, or a bilingual from birth in the rare case. The editor admits as much. Take Juhász, earlier translated by another hand: Weissbort finds it "intriguing" how Hughes "felt able to rewrite the English version without reference to any source text." Compare this with the manner in which the long Hungarian poem "John the Valiant" from Sándor Petöfi was translated by John Ridland painstakingly as the latter worked word for word with dictionaries and gradually worked up his own crib into a scaffold before adding the elegant finish that tried to match the original verse to a rough English equivalent. I'm not sure if Hughes using his own "sense" of the original text betters a scholar's meticulous setting side-by-side of the original words with handwritten definitions before constructing them into more polished verse. Many scholars by nature if not wish lack the poetic gift; do we trust poets to glide over verbal gaps and syntactic cruxes in their longing to present us with the "feel" of the original they, nearer to birdsong, cannot fully translate so much as articulate as their Muse moves them?

This is the question that this collection leaves me, and you, to ponder. ... Read more

Product Description
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.

Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."

With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Quite a valid anthology
In short:I have always loved this book, and I return to it often.The editors have assembled a wondrous array of world poems that , IMHO, succeed in meeting the goal of the text: To in some way present the joy of poetry to young people.I happen to be a non-poet in my 50's and The Rattle Bag is an ongoing source of joy in my life, because it is a thoughtful and vibrant collection.

In long[er]: Mssrs. Hughes and Heaney are who they are, and the collection here certainly makes some sort of statement about their own views of poetry as it might be encountered by young people. This collection reminds me of Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of Folk Music... each individual piece is valid in its own way, but the collection adds up to more than the sum of its parts. On the other side: the editors chose to present the poems in order, sorted alphabetically by title, which tends to minimize any sense of editorializing.In the end, it's the kind of anthology that can be opened to any page and enjoyed for any length of time, and it'll move anybody regardless of age.

Not What I Expected
I'd hoped for an eclectic selection of late 20th century poetry like Garrion Keeler's Good Poems.I found many poems I already had in other anthologies in this collection.But more than that, the poetry just didn't move me--too masculine perhaps. I wonder.

A Wonder
This collection is a masterpiece, and its companion volume the School Bag is every bit as good.While the collection includes many classics, the various obsessions of the editors have led them to uncover works that you are unlikely to have read before.

I return to this anthology again and again.

Well done
A fascinating collection, more useful for insights into the favorites of two of the more important poets of the late 20th century than for anything else. While bowing down to no old chestnuts out of misplaced respect, thecollection also suffers from a preferance for poets from Ireland and theUnited Kingdom and some choices seemingly inspired by multi-culturalism andlittle else. Nonetheless, the collection does have some wonderful piecesthat would be hard to find on one's own, as well as a fantastic tribute toShakespeare by including several passages from his plays and none of thesonnets. ... Read more

Product Description
This critical work on Shakespeare attempts to show his complete works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly-integrated, evolving organism. Identifying Shakespeare's use in the poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece", of the two most significant religious myths of the archaic world, Hughes argues that these myths later provided Shakespeare with templates for the construction of every play from "All's Well that Ends Well" to "The Tempest". He also argues that this development, in turn, represented his poetic exploration of conflicts within the "living myth" of the English Reformation. The claim is a large one, but Hughes supports his thesis with a painstakingly close analysis of language, plots and characters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Shakespeare: Elizabethan shaman of poetic lore?
A rich, rewarding book for anyone who takes the time and is able to follow Mr. Hughes exhaustively argued thesis. In some ways it is a bookend to Robert Graves "White Goddess" and those who enjoyed the one will enjoy the other. Ted Hughes mines very deep veins of poetic ore, his analysis of the thematic connections between the plays are fascinating, and whether or not we accept that Shakespeare was consciously organizing his magnum opus in the way Hughes expounds or not (it may have all been subconscious) this book reminds us once again of the enormous range of Shakespeare's poetic gifts. It is a brilliant book and just as the White Goddess has migrated from the furthest reaches of the forest of prose to the campfires of many a modern poet and writer so Hughes' book will stand the test of time and be returned to again and again. It is a powerful work and demands serious study. The sections where Ted Hughes discusses Shakespeare's "bifurcated language" and his discussion of the mythological underpinnings of the masque in The Tempest are worth the price of the book alone. Take time over this one - there is much to be savoured.

Best book on Shakespeare!
Everyone who has read this book has said it was the best book on Shakespeare they have ever read.So why is it still out of print?This book needs to be republished with a new cover (possibly with the goddess instead of the boar?), and it needs an index, perhaps instead of the outline form table of contents.It is a classic!

The Vision behind the Vision
What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from?And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from?

Many of theworld's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn tosuch questions, and more than a few have made valuable strides towards theanswers. But even so, you would search long and hard for a book to equalTed Hughes' "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" - if it's thosebig questions that you're interested in.

Whilst no brief summary canreally do this book justice, here's a rough attempt anyway...

1. For thelast fifteen plays of his career (i.e. throughout his artistic maturity),Shakespeare consistently employed the same basic prototype plot structure -what Hughes calls his "Tragic Equation". That plot structure wasderived from the inspired fusion of the plots of Shakespeare's two longnarrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Hughesdemonstrates (with staggering thoroughness) that behind every major maleprotagonist (Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear etc.) is the godAdonis, and behind every female figure (Cressida, Gertrude/Ophelia,Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia etc.) is the goddess Venus - or, moreaccurately, the Goddess of Complete Being.

This alone would make the bookan astounding achievement of literary detective work. But there is muchmore to it than that...

2. By combining the two myths in this way,Shakespeare hit upon an unfailing source of dramatic (and poetic) power.Indeed, what he tapped into was virtually the power source of all humanfeeling itself. To understand this, think about myth and religion and whatthey seem to be, VIZ, the expression of our profoundest primal instincts,of our deepest psycho-biological mysteries. They are, if you like, the DNAcode of our very souls. (Or to put it less ridiculously, they are theliving artistic expression of everything we think and feel at our core.)Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Allah, Christ,Mary, Krishna, Shiva - and countless others from around the planet - thesegods (and their experiences and sufferings) embody our brightest truths andour darkest mysteries. Their stories are the stories of our collectiveconsciousness.

3. This explains why Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear somehow feellike gods to us too: Shakespeare was quite deliberately forcing them tolive out the mythic destiny of Adonis himself. Adonis is one of the oldestprototypes of the worldwide phenomenon of the sacrificed god; as such, heis a near relative of Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, and countless others - justas Venus/Lucrece is a first cousin of Isis, Demeter, the Virgin Mary,etc.

4. Moreover, Shakespeare's *mythic intuition* was somehow greaterthan other writers before or since. In other words, he discovered all themythic possibilities of these two key stories - what exactly they wereexpressing. (Without going into *what* they do express, which is a keytheme of Hughes' book, all I shall say here is that they are born of verydeeply rooted impulses in all of us, that their key cultural manifestationsare what Hughes terms "the Great Goddess and the Sacrificed God",and that they express, if you like, humanity's *tragic dilemma*.)

5. Oncehe discovered this mythic key to his imagination (i.e. the two poemsexplosively combined), Shakespeare could then dedicate his entire maturecareer to exploring the corridors it unlocked. He harnessed all the variouspotentialities of those deeply rooted ancient stories for his ownElizabethan dramas. To use a rather violent analogy, his 'Tragic Equation'was a kind of dramatist's atomic bomb: once he had discovered the essentialnuclear reaction, he could go on finding new ways of inducing it, ways ofmaking the explosion bigger or smaller, and even finally - in "The Tempest"- how to prevent the explosion from occurring at all. He spent twelve yearspursuing this obsession, and the results speak for themselves.

6. Indeed,Hughes goes on to show that it's always at the same particular moment ineach play (i.e. when "Venus and Adonis" metamorphoses into "The Rape ofLucrece" (and in the late plays, back again)) that Shakespeare's poetrytakes off to ever-greater heights. In other words, Hughes argues that bytouching the primal mythic sources of the human imagination (where the twomyths collide), Shakespeare gains direct access to his Muse. He touches thevision itself, and records its feel in his poetry.

"Shakespeare and TheGoddess of Complete Being" is a work that forces itself upon yourimagination and stays there. It is not, however, for the skim reader. Itrequires dedicated concentration and some considerable patience forcomplex, detailed argument. It also needs a fairly healthy knowledge of upto a dozen or so of the mature plays - you might need to get out youredition of the Complete Works and start revising.

Yet for all that, thisbook is a real joy to read. Its luminous prose could only come from a poetof Hughes' own calibre; its massive scope (compassing everything from theshamanic initiation dream of a Siberian Goldi leader to Occult Neoplatonismin Renaissance Europe) is endlessly exciting and surprising; and its earfor Shakespeare's poetry and eye for his mythological allusion is virtuallyunparalleled.

But it's really for the insights into the nature of geniusthat this book is truly unforgettable. By the time you've reached "Ourrevels now are ended..." (at the end of the long dramatic sequence), Hugheshas shown you exactly *how* Shakespeare keeps managing to follow his Museup to ever more dizzying heights - almost as if you're a passenger on thejourney with him. And *that*, for a 'mere' work of literary criticism, issurely astonishing. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of prose pieces by the Poet Laureate, on literary matters and on writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about education, the environment, and the arts in general. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of sixteen articles, written by leading specialists in Classical and English literature, is an important contribution to the critical assessment of Ted Hughes, one of the most popular and controversial English poets of the late 20th century. The chapters are arranged broadly chronologically according to Hughes's publications, and deal with different aspects of his engagement with the culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, including translations, original works, classical thought, and ideologies in his drama and verse. Hughes is revealed as a leading figure in literary reception of the Classics in 20th century poetry, a sharply intelligent and sensitive reader of some of the world's foundational texts. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Throughout their marriage, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes engaged in a complex and continually evolving poetic dialogue about writing, love, and grief. Although scholars have commented extensively on the biographical details of Plath's and Hughes's marriage, few have undertaken a systematic intertextual analysis of the poets' work. The Grief of Influence reappraises this extraordinary literary partnership, and shows that the aesthetic and ideological similarities that provided a foundation for Plath's and Hughes's creative marriage - such as their mutual fascination with D. H. Lawrence and motifs of violence and war - intensified their artistic rivalry. Through close readings of both poets' work and analysis of new archival sources, Clark reveals for the first time how extensively Plath borrowed from Hughes and Hughes borrowed from Plath. She also explores the transatlantic dynamics of Plath's and Hughes's 'colonial' marriage within the context of the 1950s Anglo-American poetry scene and demonstrates how each poet's misreadings of the other contributed to the damaging stereotypes that now dominate the Plath-Hughes mythology. Following Plath and Hughes through alternating periods of collaboration and competition, The Grief of Influence shows how each poet forged a voice both through and against the other's, and offers a new assessment of the twentieth century's most important poetic partnership. ... Read more

Product Description

This study focuses on the post-Holocaust writers Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes, while also stressing the links between their work and the Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan, Miklos Radnoti, Primo Levi, and Janos Pilinszky.

Developing his theory of "awkwardness," Antony Rowland argues that post-Holocaust poetry can play an important part in our understanding of Holocaust writing. Rowland examines post-Holocaust poetry's self-conscious, imaginative engagement with the Holocaust, as well as the literature of survivors. He illuminates how "awkward" poetics enable post-Holocaust poets to provide ethical responses to history and avoid aesthetic prurience. This probing and sensitive reassessment of Holocaust-related poetry offers an important new perspective on postwar poetry.

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
This is Hughes' first collection and with it he made his reputation as a strong observer of nature. His verse is vibrant with observation of the fierce animal- rich world. His focus is away from the human and certainly away from personal relationships. His language is richly metaphoric and original. There is a toughness in his voice and a lurking sense of violence everywhere. At times he seems to enter the skin of the animals he writes about and feel and see the world as they do.
He writes of 'The Thought- Fox' and 'The Jaguar' and 'The Horses'.
I recognize the value of his work and his originality but it is fundamentally not congenial to my interests or my soul.

Here is the opening stanza of his poem 'The Jaguar'

"The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion..."

And its concluding stanza.

"More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come."

excellent book
This book should not be out of print.Besides his more recent translations (interpretations) of greek and latin texts and the recent collection "Birthday Letters," this may be Hughes' best work. Itwas his first volume published, and while volumes to follow, such as"Crow" and "Gaudette," descended into a fabricatedlandscape, this volume derives it's subject matter powerfully andbeautifully from, primarily, the natural world.Hughes' renown as adepictor of the natural world is made evident as deserved here more thanany other volume he produced.As the first publised work of a masterfuland recently deceased poet, this work should still be in print.Find it ifyou can. ... Read more

Product Description
This revised and updated edition of a Ted Hughes annotated, descriptive bibliography includes a new section recording over 1000 of his manuscripts. ... Read more

Product Description
This book introduces you to the turbulent life and works of a major literary figure of the later twentieth century. Hughes used language in new ways to express a powerful and often disturbing vision of the world. By examining his life and major work, you will be able to develop your own responses to the man and his works. ... Read more