Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008
The Myths of Ted Hughes
By Mark Ford
Letters of Ted Hughes
selected and edited by Christopher Reid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 758 pp., $45.00
It was Rudyard Kipling, that fervent chronicler of the British Empire and rapt celebrant of the depths and mysteries of England and Englishness, who first initiated Ted Hughes into the magic of poetry. During Hughes's third year at Mexborough Grammar School in Yorkshire his English teacher read the class a series of episodes from The Jungle Book; the fourteen-year-old Hughes so enjoyed these that on his next trip to the Mexborough town library he took out Kipling's Selected Poems. 'I fell completely under the spell of his rhythms,' he recalls in one of the many extraordinarily detailed and informative letters with which he responded to inquiries about his work from graduate students. As an illustration of his aping of Kipling's 'pounding rhythms and rhymes' he quotes a typical line of his teen verses: 'And the curling lips of the five gouged rips in the bark of the pine were the mark of the bear.' His early verse stories, he relates, were all set in regions exotic to a boy growing up in Yorkshire in the 1940s—the American Northwest or Far West, the Brazilian jungle, or Africa.
Review, 4594 words
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