About the Poet: Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was an English poet whose fierce, close-up poems about animals and the natural world made him one of the leading voices of the twentieth century. This lesson follows his life from the Yorkshire moors to Cambridge, Devon and the post of Poet Laureate, and shows how that life prepared the ground for “Ravens”.

Edward James Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, and grew up among moors, farms, canals and ponds, first in the Calder Valley and then in the mining town of Mexborough. After National Service in the RAF he studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he moved from English to archaeology and anthropology, a change that fed his lifelong interest in myth. He married the American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956 and made his name with his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). In the 1970s he farmed at Moortown in Devon and wrote Moortown Diary, the verse diary of farm life to which “Ravens” belongs. He became Poet Laureate in 1984 and died on 28 October 1998.

Before you study “Ravens”, it helps to know the person who wrote it. Hughes is a poet who looks hard at animals, weather and death, and almost every part of his life explains why.

Early life: moors, mills and mining towns. Edward James Hughes, known as Ted, was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a mill village in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. He was the third child of the family and grew up among local farms and the Pennine moorland. When he was seven the family moved to Mexborough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire, where his parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. Open country was never far away: he spent his free time on the moors and beside ponds and canals, watching, trapping and fishing. That early habit of close watching marks all his later work. At Mexborough Secondary School (later a grammar school) several teachers, among them John Fisher, encouraged him to write.

National Service and Cambridge. Hughes won an open exhibition (a scholarship) in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to complete his National Service first. He spent two years in the Royal Air Force as a ground wireless mechanic at an isolated station in east Yorkshire, where he had time to read. At Cambridge he began with English but changed to archaeology and anthropology, the study of early cultures, ritual and myth. That change matters for his poetry: the myths and old beliefs behind many of his poems, and the sense that animals carry ancient, powerful meanings, grow out of it.

The first book and a famous marriage. On 25 February 1956 Hughes went to a Cambridge party to launch a new magazine and met the American poet Sylvia Plath. They married on 16 June 1956. His first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), won a competition run by the Poetry Centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York, was published by Faber and Faber, and brought wide praise and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second collection, Lupercal (1960), won the Hawthornden Prize. Both books are crowded with animals: hawks, jaguars, pigs, thrushes and, in Lupercal, the fish of “Pike”.

Loss, myth and Crow. The 1960s brought personal tragedy. Hughes and Plath had two children, separated in 1962, and Plath died in February 1963. Hughes edited her unpublished work and lived for the rest of his life under intense public attention. In his own poetry he turned further towards myth and esoteric ideas, including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism, and produced Wodwo (1967) and Crow (1970), whose central figure is a dark, trickster-like bird in a violent world. The American artist Leonard Baskin, whom the couple met in 1958, illustrated Crow and many other Hughes books.

Farmer, teacher and Laureate. In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a farmer's daughter. With her father, Jack Orchard, he ran a farm called Moortown near Winkleigh in Devon. The work, which included lambing, calving, feeding animals in winter and coping with weather, became the subject of Moortown Diary, a sequence of poems on the everyday life of a working farm, first published in 1979. “Ravens” is one of the poems in it. Hughes also cared about teaching and about young readers: he wrote The Iron Man (1968) for children, supported the Arvon Foundation's residential writing courses, and served as president of the charity Farms for City Children. In 1984 he succeeded John Betjeman as Poet Laureate and held the post until his death.

Last years. In 1998 Hughes published Birthday Letters, poems addressed to Plath, which won the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was appointed to the Order of Merit shortly before he died on 28 October 1998 in London, aged 68. In 2011 a memorial slab was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

What marks a Hughes poem.

• Animals are forces, not pets or pretty emblems: the hawk, the jaguar, the pike and the crow each carry raw energy and follow their own rules.
• He is unsentimental about nature. It is violent and indifferent, and he looks at that without flinching.
• His language is physical: strong stresses, hard consonants, vivid verbs and daring comparisons make a poem feel like something you can touch.
• Myth and symbol lie behind the surface; an old bird such as the raven arrives with centuries of meaning attached.
• The poet is a watcher whose knowledge comes from real experience, in the Yorkshire moors as a boy and on a Devon farm as a man.

Where “Ravens” fits. “Ravens” belongs to Moortown Diary, so it grows out of a farmer's direct experience of a working landscape rather than a distant, bookish idea of nature. Keep that in mind as you read: it explains why death is faced directly instead of softened, and why the ravens are at once real birds on a real farm and something larger.