- Ted Hughes
Résumé :
Who is the greatest poet of this half-century? Ted Hughes, alas! So one has to admit, adapting André Gide's memorable bon mot about Victor Hugo, who was no more merely the scriptwriter of The Hunchback of Notre Dame for Walt Disney than Ted Hughes was really 'the man who killed Sylvia Plath'. Simply, if one steps back today to ask which English poets since World War II would indisputably deserve academic attention, three Hs loom forth— Hughes, Heaney & Hill—but Geoffrey Hill writes for the happy but very few, Seamus Heaney has a green passport, and Ted Hughes wins for having the heaviest weight in terms of published pages and popularity, whether positive or negative. Hughes grew more and more prolific as the years went by and produced one of his most important collections of poems the year of his death, with Birthday Letters (1998). This prodigious activity of the Poet Laureate had a nefarious tendency to dwarf other contemporary poetic figures and it is still too early for an assessment of English poetry after Hughes. But, for better or for worse, by some historical reality principle, the name of Ted Hughes will remain a landmark in English poetry, much as the name of one widely-detested small man of Twickenham prompted S.T. Coleridge to write, early in the 19th century, on 'Poets Before and Since Pope.