Joanny Moulin

Ted Hughes: the Haunted Earth Joanny Moulin

Publisher Marketing: English version of a biography of Ted Hughes first published in French in 2007. Ted Hughes's destiny had this rare peculiarity that it was inextricably wedded to that of a woman poet of a comparable strength. But neither he nor Sylvia Plath would have achieved the fame that is theirs the one without the other. Sylvia passionately wanted to give herself the life and the death that it took to metamorphose herself into lasting poetry. She immortalised herself so violently that Ted found it hard to survive as someone else than the character in the poem of her life. He managed to, however, for Ted Hughes was a secret man as well as a profound poet. Hughes's life is as dark as his writings, for he saw his poems as the erratic chance manifestations of the subterranean life of the spirit. He believed that our conscious life was only the poor surface of a rich invisible epic. Poems were for him like partly destroyed letters received from another world. No doubt that was only an illusion, but which was grounded in his England. For he came from the rural North, still haunted by ancestral superstitions. He preferred this animal life of the spirits to the sad, machine-like existence of modern man. The life of a great poet is allegorical: his poetry is the only written trace of it that counts.