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English Pages 758 [808] Year 2008
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T
ed Hughes described letter-writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world." From several thou -
sand letters, his longtime editor Christopher Reid has selected nearly three hundred, which
show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud En glishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. There are letters dealing with Hughes's work on his classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to the wonder-working
Crow and the late, revelatory Birthday Letters. There are letters discussing, with notable frankness, his marriages to Sylvia Plath and then to Assia Wevill. After marrying Carol Orchard in 1970, Hughes ran a farm in Dorset for several years, and there are report·, l, · , , from both farmyard and desk-letters touch ing on his interest in astrology, his strong and original views of Shakespeare. ;i,,, 1 I
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for fishing and fo r