What think you of Ted Hughes?

Furthermore reading and understanding W is a cumulative thing: once you're familiar with his work a piece like I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud is much more than the anthology-of-light-verse piece you may think it is.

The most powerful sections of "The Prelude" are often called the "spots of time" passages. These, The Intimations of Mortality Ode, and Tintern Abbey are good places to start.

Here is one of my favourite "spots of time" passages: it may give you an idea whether it's the kind of thing that you'd be interested in exploring further.

I remember well
('Tis of an early season that I speak,
The twilight of rememberable life),
While I was yet an urchin, one who scarce
Could hold a bridle, with ambitious hopes
I mounted, and we rode towards the hills.
We were a pair of horsemen: honest James
Was with me, my encourager and guide.
We had not travelled long ere some mischance
Disjoined me from my comrade, and, through fear
Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor
I led my horse, and stumbling on, at length
Came to a bottom where in former times
A man, the murderer of his wife, was hung
In irons. Mouldered was the gibbet-mast;
The bones were gone, the iron and the wood;
Only a long green ridge of turf remained
Whose shape was like a grave. I left the spot,
And reascending the bare slope I saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and more near
A girl who bore a pitcher on her head
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was in truth
An ordinary sight, but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon on the lonely eminence,
The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind.

Does Eliot count as an English poet? (Surely, if Yeats does!)

Best CD of Hughes' poems/writing?

Great review of the Hughes bio by Janet Malcolm.

Thank you, devoured that like a bowl of custard-covered Christmas cake.

Malcolm's book on Plath/Hughes is electrifying.

I haven't read that book - I'll need to.

Proper lit journalist busting some balls.

In my literary youth I listened to a recording of Hughes reading his poems, including this one:

What will you make of half a man
Half a face
A ripped edge

His one-eyed waking
Is the shorn sleep of aftermath

His vigour
The bone-deformity of consequences

His talents
The deprivations of escape

How will you correct
The veteran of negatives
And the survivor of cease?

Back in my teens I would go along with anything, but even so that one didn't work for me. (Better than this though.) Also, "shorn sleep" was so close to "shorn sheep" that it ruined the effect, and I was sure that's where Hughes got it.

Sean O'Brien wrote an essay about Hughes going off the rails for a while with respect to diction. I've read Orghast at Persepolis which was about some pretty strange stuff.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/01/14/tom-overton/ted-hughes-in-hebden-bridge/

The Iron Man is described as being taller than a house, his head is as large as a bedroom and his feet are as large as a bed. So when he falls down the cliff and smashes into pieces on the beach, how come a seagull can pick up one of his eyes and a hand?

Because the first set of impossibilities you cited implies room for further impossibilities?

A deeply unsatisfying answer for many reasons.

Anyway despite that minor editorial inconsistency I'm glad that this book is as unique and captivating as I remembered. and that our 6 year old seems quite taken with it too.