Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming. The introduction and notes (added in 1989) sketch in the background from which these remarkable poems emerged as an improvised verse journal, sparely edited, coalescing spontaneously on the page. ' Moortown Diary keeps its eye firmly on the creatures behind the language. It's written in the style of Hughes's play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable...Hughes strips away the protective layers - the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can't think of anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we're not just here to think about literature. We're here to try to wake up.' Alice Oswald, The Guardian 'It grips your heart, and your intestines, like a vice from the first page. He makes language as physical as a bruise, and in these poems beauty and tenderness blend with violence.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'The Moortown sequence includes some of Hughes's finest poems...They are like no other poems I have read, with a degree of intensity, sanity and grace that he has never equalled.' Anthony Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author's ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes's poetic process. Hughes's extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book's unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes's techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes's changing ideas about how poetry 'ought' to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes's major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes's poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century's most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.

In this book, Raphael Ingelbien examines how issues of nationhood have affected the works and the reception of several English and Irish poets - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. This studyexplores the interactions between post-war English poets and the ways in which they transformed or misread earlier poetic visions of England - Romantic, Georgian, Modernist."

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. The first in-depth study of Hughes’s personal papers published after his death, The Laughter of Foxes, is here offered in a newly revised second edition. An intimate yet critical survey of Hughes’s work, The Laughter of Foxes is penned by an acclaimed scholar and one of Hughes’ closest friends. Keith Sagar probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics—including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes’s poem “A Dove Came” through its evolving drafts—reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes’s work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to Sagar, a detailed chronology of Hughes’s life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story "Crow." Sagar also revisits his original introduction in this new edition, expanding it with additional insights into Hughes’s poetry as well as a detailed account of Hughes’s version of Euripedes’ Alcestis. A compelling study that the Daily Telegraph called “invaluable for anyone interested in Hughes’ work,” The Laughter of Foxes unearths the man behind the myth who struggled to transform his imaginative life from pain into hope.

From the trembling new-born calf in Season Songs to the gently sleeping one recorded in Moortown Diary, animal life as observed in the pages of Flowers and Insects, Elmet, River, Lupercal and Hawk in the Rain is seen afresh through the diversity and imaginative energy of this collected volume.

Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books.

Sheep are marginalised in literary criticism and in discussion of pastoral literature. This book brings an animal studies approach to poetry about sheep that allows for the agency of these sentient beings, that have been associated for humans over ten thousand years. This approach highlights the distinction between wild and domesticated species and the moral dilemma between the goals of animal welfare and those of saving species from extinction. Discussion of mostly contemporary poetry follows a new reading of works from the pastoral and georgic canon. Allowing for the sentience and sociality of this species makes it easier to imagine a natureculture within which to make kin across the species boundary. Reading poetry about sheep has the power to make new meanings as we try to adapt to an increasingly complex and problematic environment.

The author here argues that the traditions of Pope and Goldsmith are continued in the present day by the likes of R.S. Thomas, George Mackay Brown, and others work in an 'anti-pastoralist' tradition of Crabbe and Clare. A chapter examining the attitudes towards the environment of sixteen contemporary poets concludes a lively ecological introduction to modern poetry.