Jonathan Bate’s unofficial biography of Ted Hughes captures the great poet in all his wild complexityThere was so much of him. He lived the lives of many men called Ted Hughes. Driven,all of them, by a core of energy so brilliant and fierce it burned out many of those he encountered. By the time he reached manhood, or he had,fully developed, an appetite, or even a greed,above all a relentless questing passion for the life of passion itself which he sought and fed with poetry, sex and transformative mysticism about the soil and its meaning. Sometimes jubilant (extremely joyful), and sometimes tormented. He had a compulsion,which seemed to him to be mysterious, to confess and record everything that claimed his concentration. And at whatever the cost.
As a boy in Yorkshire on the moors he saw the cruelty of animals, and with his idolised 10-years -older brother,Gerald, was himself unafraid to shoot, and to trap fish and skin them. From his family and their friends’ lacerated feelings in the first world war, he knew about the cruelty of man to man. From his always vast reading he absorbed the violence of society.
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Source: theguardian.com