A selective list online literary criticism for the British poet Ted Hughes, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in peer and editor reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages
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Bere, Carol. An introduction to Ted Hughes in the Literary Encyclopedia, 04 October 2004
Churchwell, Sarah. "Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath." Criticism, Wntr, 1998
Clanchy, Kate. "The Nationalisation of Ted Hughes." On teaching Ted Hughes in Britain, the author asks "why, then, are we as a nation so anxious to expose the young to Hughes?" Thumbscrew, No 14 - Autumn 1999
Eddins, Dwight. "Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: The Poetry of the Will." Eddins contends that Schopenhauer's pessimism "finds its fullest poetic realization, however, in our own time, in the verse of Ted Hughes. His menagerie - the hawk, the jaguar, the shark, and their ilk - fits even better than [D. H. ] Lawrence's birds, beasts, and flowers into Schopenhauer's "bellum omnium" of predation." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1999.
Elie, Paul. A Poet's Unmistakable Voice: Remembering Ted Hughes, in Commonweal, July 16, 1999
Feinstein, Elaine. Review of the biography Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet that is generally negative. In the Guardian, 10/28/01. A more positive review, in the New Statesman, Nov 19, 2001 (removed from Findarticles.com)
Gifford, Terry. A Return to "The Wound" by Ted Hughes. "Deep in the heart of Wodwo there lies 'The Wound.' Among the poems and stories a radio play is offered as part of the 'single adventure' of the volume." Kingfisher (I:46-53), 1978
Gifford, Terry. The Fate of Ted Hughes's Papers. "It seems to have gone unnoticed in the UK that in spring 1997 Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia bought, for an undisclosed sum, the entire collection of Ted Hughes's papers - all 2.5 tons of manuscripts, notebooks and letters." Thumbscrew, No 14 - Autumn 1999
Heaney, Seamus. Bags of Enlightenment. Seamus Heaney writes about his collaboration with Ted Hughes on the poetry anthologies. In The Guardian, October 25, 2003
Hughes, Ted. Context: Answers by Ted Hughes. Hughes responds to questions about poetry, The London Magazine, Vol 1 No 11, February 1962
Jong, Erica. An Art Like Everything Else. Jong writes about the impact in 1963 of Sylvia Plath's poems published posthumously in the New Yorker. NY Times Book Review, Dec. 12, 2004
Keegan, Paul, ed. "Essential but unlovely." Review of The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes" (Faber, 2003), edited by Paul Keegan. "The publication of Ted Hughes' Collected Poems shows both his genius and his failings, says reviewer Sean O'Brien." The Guardian, November 1, 2003 Another review of The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes by Claas Kazzer, web published. Another short review by Keith Sager, discusses Hughes' interest in the mythic and mystical, web published.
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann "Reading word, image, and the body of the book: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Cave Birds," in Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004
Motion, Andrew. A review of Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook (Little, Brown) In The Guardian, July 17, 2004
Moulin, Joanny. "Hughes with Barthes: Mytho-poetic Icons" paper presented at the E. S. S. E. Conference in Glasgow, September 1995
Moulin, Joanny. "Transcultural identities in the poems of Philippe Jaccotte and Ted Hughes." Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines No. 8 Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier, 1995
Oswald, Alice. "Wild Things," an appreciation of Ted Hughes by poet Alice Oswald. December 3, 2005, The Guardian
Ritch, Alan. "Hay in Art," brief comparison of six poems about hay by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney
Sagar, Keith. An introduction to Alcestis Short article considers Ted Hughes' Alcestis in the context of Greek theatre and his life and work. Web published
Stigen-Drangsholt, J. "Ted Hughes and Romanticism: A Poetry of Desolation," in Cercles 12 (2005)
Wagner, Erica. "Life After Plath" The editor of the (London) Times discusses the publication of poems from Hughes' Birthday Letters in the Times in 1998. "After nearly thirty five years of silence on the subject, it was revealed towards the end of January 1998 that Hughes was finally going to speak out, by publishing a hitherto unsuspected collection of poems written over the years since Plath died, about his life with her. The Times, recognising a major literary event, announced a six part serialisation." Magma, No. 12 (Spring 1998)
Webster, Richard. 'The thought-fox' and the poetry of Ted Hughes, The Critical Quarterly, 1984
Whittington-Egan, Richard. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath-a marriage examined. Briefly discusses Hughes' last two books and his relationship with Plath. In Contemporary Review, Feb, 2005
Worthen, John. A review of DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. Reviewer (and Poet Laureate) Andrew Motion objects that Worthen undervalues Lawrence's poetry, mentions its influence on Ted Hughes. March 5, 2005, The Guardian
NYTimes feature site on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath contains links to Times archived articles on the poets, including a 1957 review of The Hawk in Rain by W.S. Merwin, reviews of From the Life and Songs of Crow, Moortown, Wolfwatching, Tales From Ovid, and more (this material is free but requires a one-time registration)
The Great Unspecified Unifying Project Brief article on Ted Hughes notes "it might be argued that it's precisely because Hughes works in isolation from his street-wise and world-weary contemporaries, precisely because his imagination is entirely foreign to the industrially determined logic of late twentieth-century Western, urban, ironising culture, that his work remains popular and is worth reading." By Sansom, Ian, in Poetry Review Volume 87, No 3 (Autumn 97)
Meeting Ted Hughes. Carolyne Wright talks about her meeting with Ted Hughes in Bangladesh in 1989, in Poetry Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Autumn 1999)
A recording of Ted Hughes reading "Pike," W.W. Norton
An introduction to Ted Hughes from the (UK) Guardian, with links to additional Guardian articles on him
Beguiled by the wild "Ted Hughes' tone varied little over 50 years - but does that matter? John Kinsella finds the authority of a master in his Collected Poems." In The Observer, November 2, 2003
Ted on Sylvia, for the record "The British Library has recently acquired the 30-year correspondence between Ted Hughes and the critic Keith Sagar. Christina Patterson has read these remarkable letters and says our view of Hughes will never be quite the same." In The Guardian, August 18, 2001
Greek is the word "In his masterly translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes pays perfect homage to `the most necessary play of all time,'" by George Steiner, in The Observer, October 24, 1999
Two poets talk about their reactions to Hughes' Birthday Letters, by Matthew Curry and Phil Hatfield
"Earth - Moon, A Ted Hughes Web Site" by independent scholar Claas Kazzer
Hughes bibliography with annotations part of a syllabus for a class on post-war British poetry, Univ. of Salford
Brief annotated primary and secondary bibliography for Ted Hughes from a class on British poetry after 1950, at Royal Holloway, Univ. of London
Information about the exhibit of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath documents in 2005, which "brings together for the first time original letters, manuscripts and photographs from the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College and from the Ted Hughes archive at Emory University. The exhibition documents the close creative relationship of these two poets during the years of their marriage and the repercussions of Plath's tragic suicide in the life and work of her husband, the late poet laureate of Britain." Grolier Club, press release
A review of the Grolier Club exhibition in the (London) Times, 9/10/05
Plath and Hughes: Good Times, Bad Times and All the Rest of It The NYTimes reviews the Grolier exhibit, September 23, 2005
"Issues In Ecocriticism: Reading Ted Hughes." A noteworthy Ted Hughes syllabus, by Dr Matthew R Jarvis, Univ. of Wales
A primary and secondary bibliography from The Centre for Ted Hughes Studies
Information on the 5th International Ted Hughes Conference, Emory Univ. October 5-7, 2005
Information on 'Ted Hughes and the Classics' a conference to be held at Edinburgh University, November 25th -27th 2005
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