╥Mankind is many rivers / That only want to run. / Holy Tragedy and Loss / Make the many One.╙
When Ted Hughes wrote his short, memorial poem to mark the funeral of Princess Diana, he knew he was dying of cancer. Sadness at the death of the Poet Laureate will by no means amount to the expression of collective grief he recorded in that poem. But there is a real sense in which Hughes, like few poets before him ╤ Tennyson, another laureate, is one ╤ will be mourned not only as a great writer but also as a public figure.
Hughes╒s public persona was nothing like that of his Victorian predecessor. Although Tennyson had his demons, and was the subject of considerable journalistic interest, personal and literary matters collided in Hughes╒s life with far more explosive results. He wasn╒t someone who spoke out, ex cathedra, on the issues of the day. His public nature represented something different and altogether more modern ╤ almost a living, working definition of media celebrity.
At the centre of his fame was a flayed, raw pain which left flailing all who tried to get a grip on it. Hughes, locked in his Devon fastness, seemed as bleak, mysterious and primitive as his own poetry. His silence about Sylvia Plath made him, in his own words, ╥a projection post for every worst suspicion╙.
To make things worse, his reputation as a writer steadily declined from his appointment as Laureate in 1984. His poetic stock continued to reside mainly in the ruthless, instinctive early work ╤ from Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Cave Birds (1978) ╤ which drew millions of schoolchildren to poetry. The publication of his Selected Poems 1957-94 in 1995 gave rise to a critical summing-up and, so far as critics were concerned, the matter seemed settled. His retelling of the Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid, was published to acclaim in 1997, winning the Whitbread Book of the Year award ╤ but it seemed like an elegant coda.
Then, in January 1998, came the bombshell, with the sensation of Birthday Letters, dealing explicitly with his relationship with Sylvia Plath. Immediately hailed as a masterpiece, and selling over 100,000 copies, Birthday Letters was generally agreed to put Hughes in the pantheon of great British poets. The effort it must have cost him to write them hardly bears imagining.
At a stroke, those magnificent poems established Hughes╒s reputation for years to come. Far from seeming the anachronistic figure that, say, Kipling did when he died, or writing bad poems as Tennyson was, he leaves us with his best work hardly cold from the presses. He goes into the darkness not a grand old man, but the fiery, truculuent spirit of his youth: the same image we have of him in a famous photograph at the offices of Faber and Faber, where he stands, the young tyro, next to Eliot, Auden, Spender and MacNeice. Posterity may well show him to have been greater than all of them.
