Britain Loses Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, 68, to Cancer

By MARJORIE MILLER

Oct. 30, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LONDON —

British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whose failed marriage to the tortured American poet Sylvia Plath earned him the wrath of many feminists but inspired some of his best writing, has died of cancer, it was announced Thursday. He was 68.

The reclusive poet, ranked by some critics alongside such 20th century greats as T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, died Wednesday at his home in Devon, in southwestern England.

“After a valiant 18-month fight against cancer, Ted Hughes died yesterday. The loss to his family is inestimable,” Hughes’ publishers at Faber & Faber said. He had asked his friends to keep the cancer secret.

In Britain, Hughes was known as an enormously successful author who made poetry popular. His version of the Racine play “Phedre” is being staged in London now. “Tales From Ovid,” his reworking of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” was awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year prize by a jury that called it a work of “greatness and sublimity.”

And his “Birthday Letters,” a collection of passionate poems about his tumultuous love and seven-year marriage to Plath unexpectedly published in January, won rave reviews and became a bestseller. More than 90,000 copies have been sold so far.

But in the United States, the troubled Hughes-Plath marriage itself may be more famous than any of Hughes’ stunning poems about love or nature.

Hughes left his wife for another woman shortly before Plath committed suicide Feb. 11, 1963, by sticking her head in a gas oven. Many Plath fans blamed him for her death although she already had tried to kill herself three years before she met him.

For 35 years, Hughes chose not to defend himself against those who shouted “Murderer!” at his poetry readings and painted him as the villain who had deprived the world of more Plath poetry. His surname was repeatedly chipped off Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire in northern England, and his silence seemed to feed the rage against him.

Then without warning, “Birthday Letters” appeared “like a thunderbolt,” as the poet Andrew Motion wrote in The Times of London.

“Anyone who thought Hughes’ reticence was proof of his hard heart will immediately see how stony they have been themselves,” Motion wrote. “It closes in a heart of darkness, a black hole of grief and regret. We stare into it feeling changed and enriched.”

The book is still making waves. The New Yorker magazine this month published a poem by Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney called “On First Looking Into Ted Hughes’s ‘Birthday Letters.’ ” It reads, in part:

“Passive suffering: who said it was disallowed

As a theme for poetry? Already in ‘Beowulf’

The dumbfounding of woe, the stunt and stress

Of hurt-in-hiding is the best of it--”

In a letter issued at the time of the book’s publication, Hughes said he had never intended to publish the poems written over a quarter of a century but suddenly felt compelled. His death now sheds light on that urgency.

Hughes was a striking man with angular cheeks, a chiseled nose and probing, gray-blue eyes. “Meeting Hughes is like being watched by a fox, or perhaps a wolf,” author John Cornwell once wrote in a magazine article.

The son of a carpenter, Hughes was born Aug. 17, 1930, in the blackened mill town of Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire. He began crafting poems in grammar school and, after studying at Cambridge University, took part-time jobs to support his writing.

His first book of poems, “The Hawk in the Rain,” was published in 1957 and won immediate acclaim for its unsentimental and violent views of nature. He went on to publish dozens of collections of verse, prose, opera libretti and plays. He also published children’s poetry and stories, including a popular one in the United States called “The Iron Giant.”

Hughes met Plath at Cambridge, where she was a Fulbright scholar, and the two married in 1956. The author of “The Bell Jar” and “Ariel” swung between extremes of exhilaration and depression, as did her writing. The literary couple had two children, Nicholas and Frieda, before Hughes left Plath for Assia Wevill, the wife of a friend, and Plath committed suicide.

In 1969, Wevill killed herself and Shura, the daughter she had with Hughes. But it was Plath’s anguished life and death, after leaving cookies and milk for their children in the next room, that have captured the public’s imagination and much of Hughes’.

In writing “Birthday Letters,” Hughes said he had “tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife, not thinking to make a poem, thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself and to feel her there listening.” The title apparently stemmed from Hughes’ belief that Plath was reborn in death.

Eileen Aird, a Cambridge University professor and poetry critic, called the book “astounding, reparative and very loving.” She said she was saddened by Hughes’ death.

“Whatever went on between Hughes and Plath, he was a brilliant poet,” Aird said.

Christopher Reid, poetry editor of Faber & Faber, said Hughes was a great teller of truths.

“He could say things so . . . truthfully and wittily you just burst out laughing. I think that is one of the great things he gave to literature of our time--the need to tell the truth, however black, however grim, unlovable it might be. I don’t think anybody in our time has written better about nature, about the wild, about the elements, about the primitive that’s both out there in the world and inside us,” Reid said.

Hughes was married again in 1970 to Carol Orchard, a farmer’s daughter from Devon. In 1984, he was made Britain’s poet laureate, an honor bestowed for life by the monarch and which brings payment of about $117 and a case of wine every year.

Hughes’ last appearance in public was 13 days ago, when he received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. Membership in the British order is bestowed on those who particularly distinguish themselves in science, art, literate or the promotion of culture.

The queen issued a statement Thursday saying she was “very saddened” by his death. “She was grateful for the opportunity to recognize his work and achievements before he died,” a palace statement said.

Also before he died, Hughes saw the publication of daughter Frieda’s first book of poetry, “Wooroloo.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ted Hughes Excerpts

Excerpts from Ted Hughes’ poetry about his first wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at age 30.

“St. Botolph’s” (Their first meeting, Cambridge University, 1956.)

First sight. First snapshot isolated

Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.

Taller

Than you ever were again. Swaying so slender

It seemed your long, perfect, American legs

Simply went on up. That flaring hand,

Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.