Ted Hughes

(1930 - 1998)

“I was writing all the time, but in confusion,” the Yorkshire­-born poet Ted Hughes said in 1995 about his time at Cambridge during the early 1950s. “I mopped up everything that was going on inside me with Beethoven’s music. Throughout that time, he was my therapy.” Wodwo was Hughes’ first collection after the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath; his second wife, Assia Wevill, committed suicide two years after it was published. The author of more than a dozen books, Hughes served as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death in 1998.