Ted Hughes

The Unauthorised Life

By: Jonathan Bate

Narrated by: Mike Grady

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.

With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.

Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honors, though not uncritically, Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.

Masterful work and delivery

One of the finest biographies I have ever read, beautifully declaimed. And the subject was an unfairly maligned force of nature, and a true genius.

Ted Hughes Poetic Universe

It was a fascinating immersion into the life of a poet. His charismatic shadow mixed with the one of Silvia Plath does not result in darkness but accentuates the light.

Phenomenal thanks to narrator!

Being more of a Sylvia Plath fan, I hesitated in wanting to learn about Ted Hughes, but I must say between the superb writing and compelling and warm narration, I was always eager to continue listening to this audible book. Unlike Mad Girl's Love Song about Plath whose narrator ruined the total book for me, this narrator did the opposite and drew me into the world of Hughes again and again. Bravo!

Great Dead Poet

Maybe the speculative analysis was too long, but in the end, it delivered some good insights and a better understanding of his journey