British Poet Ted Hughes - Five Things You May Not Know

While British poet Ted Hughes was as prolific a poet as they come, the sheer fact that he was a poet means you probably know little about him, if you've heard of him at all. So, as an introduction to this fine writer, here are a few interesting facts you may or may not know about the poet Ted Hughes. For those of you who have had the pleasure of reading his work already, this will be a nice supplement to current knowledge.

1. He wrote "The Iron Giant." That's right, the inspirational, adult-friendly animated feature (featuring the voices of Jennifer Aniston and Vin Diesel, among others) is loosely based on a children's book written by Hughes called "The Iron Man," published in 1968. The story, an account of a little boy who makes friends with an innocent giant robot from outer space, initially began as a bedtime story Hughes told to his children (Feinstein 175). In 2003, local schoolchildren in Mytholmroyd, the town in West Yorkshire, England where Hughes was born, illustrated different chapters of the book and put them onto "weatherproof and vandal resistant boards" affixed to platforms at the local railway station. The story and pictures of the boards can be seen here.

2. He was married to Sylvia Plath. Okay, so you probably already know that Ted Hughes's first wife was the now infamous American poet Sylvia Plath, and you may even know that her 1963 suicide by gas was likely driven by Hughes's own infidelity (the suspicion of which drove her to, among other things, make a bonfire of all the papers in Hughes study and watch as they burned (Feinstein 126-127). What you may not know is that the 1980 publication of Plath's collected poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was assembled and edited by Hughes himself. Hughes, who was married to Plath for roughly six years, was easily the best person for the job. Not only was he intimately acquainted with her work and style, but he had access to obscure and unpublished pieces that without his guidance may have been lost. As he writes in the introduction to Plath's The Collected Poems, "This book contains not merely what verse she saved, but - after 1956 - all she wrote."