Prince of poetry

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. By Jonathan Bate.Harper; 662 pages; $40. William Collins; £30.

APPROPRIATELY for one born in the small, remote Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd and who translated classical writers such as Euripides and Ovid, Ted Hughes was obsessed by the power of myth; and it had a crucial impact on his life and on his work. In a magisterial new biography Sir Jonathan Bate, professor of English literature at Oxford University, likens the poet’s life to a Greek tragedy, with the death of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, as the first of a series of devastating events. Plath’s suicide, in 1963, was followed six years later by that of Assia Wevill, who had succeeded her in Hughes’s affections; and she took their four-year-old daughter with her. That same year another former lover died of cancer; his mother, too, Hughes believed, of shock. Finally, 11 years after his own death in 1998, his adored son Nicholas took his life, “the one thing that would have destroyed him.”