Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honors, though not uncritically, Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.

Ted Hughes

Jonathan Bate

Harper, 2015

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

Ted Hughes. The Unauthorised Life

William Collins

Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry.

Stressed, Unstressed

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

HarperCollins, Publishers

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned? Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, "Soul of the Age" leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colorful and often violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking. Written by one of the world's leading experts, it combines almost everything there is to know about the man and his work in one sensational narrative, and brings us closer than ever to understanding what being Shakespeare was actually like.

Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare

History & Criticism

Penguin Books, Limited (UK)

A witty, historical account of how Shakespeare has come to be accepted as the world genius of literature. The book includes an attack on nationalistic interpretations of Shakespeare.

The Genius of Shakespeare

Picador

'What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world' Seamus Heaney John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley and a life to match. The 'poet's poet', he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, unveiled in 1989. Here at last is Clare's full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare's ringing voice quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.

John Clare

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Pan/Macmillan

In the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the environment and why poetry matters in the new millennium. In fascinating detail, Bate explains how words like 'culture' and 'environment' have evolved since the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Romantics to the present day.

Song of the Earth

British & Irish

Genius of Shakespeare

Picador USA

Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and The Environmental Tradition

In identifying Wordsworth's interest in nature as a vital, ecological interest, and linking it with the ecological debate in political history, this study attempts to define the politics of poetry. Wordsworth is shown as a wisdom figure and the guide to a pastoral consciousness we cannot afford to neglect. The author displays the fundamentals in Wordsworth's poetry of place, including that peculiar emphasis on locality inherited by, amongst others, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Seamus Heaney.

Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition

Routledge

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Books by Jonathan Bate