Literary Birthday – 17 August – Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 and died on 28 October 1998.
Ted Hughes Quotes
- The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
- What happens in the heart simply happens.
- What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
- Applause is the beginning of abuse.
- …imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
Ted Hughes was an English poet and children’s writer who served as Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. He is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Hughes married American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956. Plath died by suicide in 1963. Many years later, Hughes wrote Birthday Letters, a collection of poems about their relationship and its aftermath. Hughes received numerous honours during his career. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1977 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. Shortly before his death, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him to the Order of Merit. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of the ‘50 greatest British writers since 1945’. In 2011, a memorial plaque honouring Hughes was installed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ted_Hughes.jpeg
by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar