The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes’s proposition that ‘every child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments — political, as well as geographical — which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, ‘the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’. 

Neil Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he organised the Seventh International Ted Hughes Conference in 2015. He has written numerous books about English Literature, especially modern poetry, including Ted Hughes: A Literary Life and A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove. His latest book is Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel.

Mark Wormald is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK. He was the co-editor, with Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, of Ted Hughes: from Cambridge to Collected (2013), and is the editor of the Ted Hughes Society Journal. His book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes will be published in 2019.

Terry Gifford is the author/editor/co-editor of seven books on Ted Hughes including Ted Hughes (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011), New Casebooks: Ted Hughes (2015) and Ted Hughes in Context (2018). He is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University, UK and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.