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Spring Awakening

Frank Wedekind

This version of Frank Wedekind's extraordinary play Spring Awakening was specially commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The themes it addresses and the sheer energy of the writing make this masterpiece of German symbolism startlingly relevant today.

With its scenes of pubescent angst, sexual outspokenness, rape and homosexuality, the play still, more than one hundred years after it was first staged, has the power to shock. Ted Hughes's rendition lends the dialogue a particularly modern terseness and bite, drawing out all the erotic energy of the original.
Four Quartets (Audio, Faber)

T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes
Letters of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes described letter-writing as “excellent training for conversation with the world.” These nearly 300 letters—selected from several thousand—show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud Englishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience.
There are letters dealing with Hughes’s work on classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to 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 letters touching on his interest in
astrology, his strong and original views of Shakespeare, and his passion for farming, fishing, and the environment in general. Letters to Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin situate Hughes among his peers as never before.
Letters of Ted Hughes reveals the author as a prose writer of great vigor and subtlety. It deepens our understanding of—and our admiration for—this great twentieth-century poet.
Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes
The Waste Land and Other Poems (Audio, Faber)

T. S. Eliot
Collected Poems

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
Tales from Ovid

Ovid
Phedre: A Play

Jean Racine

A lean, high-tension version of a classic tragedy.The myth of Phaedra is one of the most powerful in all of classical mythology. As dramatized by the French playwright Jean Racine (1639-99), the dying Queen's obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus, and the scrupulously upright Hippolytus' love for the forbidden beauty Aricia has come to be known as one of the great stories of tragic infatuation, a tale of love strong enough to bring down a kingdom.In this "tough, unrhyming avalanche of a translation" (Paul Taylor, The Independent), Hughes replaces Racine's alexandrines with an English verse that serves eloquently to convey the passions of his protagonists. The translation was performed to acclaim in London in 1998, and the London production, starring Diana Rigg, was staged in 1999 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music."We are still catching up with Ted Hughes's gift for narrative verse after his Tales from Ovid," one English critic observed after the London premiere. "Little needs to happen on stage when there's a swirling action-packed disaster movie-riddled with sex and violence-in Hughes's free verse."
Collected Poems

Ted Hughes

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.
Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry

Ted Hughes

The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

No other major contemporary American writer has inspired such intense curiosity about her life as Sylvia Plath. Now the intimate and eloquent personal diaries of the twentieth century's most important female poet reveal for the first time the true story behind "The Bell Jar" and her tragic suicide at thirty. They paint, as well, a revealing portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose stature has seldom been equalled.
"A revelation." The New York Times
Crow

Ted Hughes
The Essential Shakespeare

Shakespeare

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.
The Mermaid's Purse: poems by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

In The Mermaid's Purse, Ted Hughes explores the ocean. From starfish and seagulls to mermaids and monsters, 28 poems capture the beauty, drama, and mystery of the sea and the seashore. Here is the ghostly cormorant: "Drowned fishermen come back/As famished cormorants/With bare and freezing webby toes/Instead of boots and pants." The strange and comical flounder: "The flounder sees/Through crooked eyes./Through crooked lips/The flounder cries." And the mermaid herself: "Call her a fish,/Call her a girl./Call her the pearl/Of an oyster fresh/On its pearly dish."

By turns lyrical, whimsical, and robust, The Mermaid's Purse showcases the distinctive voice and appreciation of the natural world that made Ted Hughes among the most respected of late-20th-century poets. Made doubly accessible by Flora McDonnell's distinctive black-and-white art, this sea-themed collection will delight children and be welcomed by educators.
Collected Poems

Ted Hughes

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.
Selected Translations: Poems

Ted Hughes

“EXPAND[S] OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THIS FASCINATING LITERARY CHARACTER.” —STEVEN RATINER, THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Known (with Philip Larkin) as the most distinctly English of the postwar British poets, Ted Hughes was a boundlessly curious reader and translator of poetry from other languages. This generous selection of his translations at once rounds out the publication of his major work and gives us a fresh view of his poetic achievement.
In 1965, Hughes, already famous in Britain, founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, and a number of the translations here are of poems by his contemporaries: the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, the Hungarian János Pilinszky, and the Serbian Vasko Popa. At the same time, Hughes was forever in search of older precursors, whether Homer, Lorenzo de’ Medici, or the authors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his translations of them deepen our sense of his interest in pagan ritual and esoteric religion. These two strains of his work as translator were brought together late in his career, establishing him as one of the foremost interpreters of the classics in English.
New Selected Poems

Ted Hughes
Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse

Ted Hughes
The Hawk in the Rain: Poems

Ted Hughes

Originally published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was the first collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The book won the New York Poetry Center First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore; it also won the Somerset Maugham Award. Indeed, Hawk in the Rain was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir, and in its pages we can still see the promising brilliance of one of the most important English-speaking poets of the modern age.
Collected Poems for Children

Ted Hughes

This collection brings together the more than 250 children’s poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his career. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those published for younger readers and progressing to more complex and sophisticated poems that he felt were written “within hearing” of children. Throughout, Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child’s insatiable wonderment and sense of humor as well as his own instinctive and illuminating perspective on people and other creatures of the natural world.

With drawings that capture the wit, range, and richness of these poems, acclaimed illustrator Raymond Briggs helps make this a book any reader can return to again and again for amusement, inspiration, and reassurance.