Edward James Hughes OM OBE FRSL (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998)[1] was an English poet, translator, and children's writer.

In 1946, one of Hughes's early poems, "Wild West", and a short story were published in the grammar school magazine The Don and Dearne.

[5] During the same year, Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his national service first.

[5][13] He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself.

[17] After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes had many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a nightwatchman, and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank.

[citation needed] Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come

[5] Reflecting later in Birthday Letters, Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers.

The work favoured hard-hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of Middle English — a style he used throughout his career — over the more genteel latinate sounds.

[22] The couple returned to England in 1959, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London.

[5] Hughes began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism, with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s.

Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965.

[45] Hughes bought a house known as Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, while still maintaining the property at Court Green.

Between 1971 and 1981, it published sixteen titles, comprising poems by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Ruth Fainlight, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney.

[51] In early 1994, increasingly alarmed by the decline of fish in rivers local to his Devonshire home, Hughes became involved in conservation activism.

He had continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal heart attack on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment for colon cancer in Southwark, London.

His most significant work is perhaps Crow (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse.

Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, had declined, because of ill health and a loss of creative momentum, dying a year later.

[61] Also in 1992, Hughes published Rain Charm for the Duchy, collecting together for the first time his Laureate works, including poems celebrating important royal occasions.

The poem was eventually published in Birthday Letters and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997).

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age.

[67] The West Riding dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful.

[11] Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian, and ecological viewpoint.

[67] In 1965, he founded with Daniel Weissbort the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which involved bringing to the attention of the West the work of Czesław Miłosz, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known, from such countries as Poland and Hungary, then controlled by the Soviet Union.

The programme included contributions from poets Simon Armitage and Ruth Fainlight, broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, biographers Elaine Feinstein and Jonathan Bate, activist Robin Morgan, critic Al Alvarez, publicist Jill Barber, friend Ehor Boyanowsky, patron Elizabeth Sigmund, friend Daniel Huws, Hughes's US editor Frances McCullough, and younger cousin Vicky Watling.

In 2008, the British Library acquired a large collection comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries, and correspondence.

On 16 November 2013, Hughes's former hometown of Mexborough held a special performance trail, as part of its "Right Up Our Street" project, celebrating the writer's connection with the town.