![]() ![]() ![]() Always critically valued, his dense, bloody poetry of the natural world made him a surprise poet laureate in 1984. Hughes took a magical, shamanic view of poetry: it is "a journey into the inner universe", "an exploration of the genuine self", "a way of making things happen the way you want them to happen". Having resisted all publicity, Hughes's last interview was given to the American fishing magazine Wild Steelhead and Salmon he had felt confident he would not be asked about Sylvia Plath. Jobs to support himself while writing – though the urge to produce children's stories was also financial – included "rose gardener, night-watchman in a steel factory, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and reader for J Arthur Rank". He did his national service with the RAF as a mechanic in Yorkshire, with "nothing to do but read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". At Pembroke College, Cambridge he began studying English but, finding his own writing stifled, changed to archaeology and anthropology. Hughes started writing by composing comic poems "for classroom consumption" at the age of 11. ![]()
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