Bate is a discriminating reader of sources but, deprived of the liberty to demonstrate his critical evaluation that Hughes was a “great poet”, he must take it as read. Ted Hughes' Letters: 'I'd like to see the whole truth told' Ted Hughes at a May Ball with a friend, Carina This decision obliged Bate to rewrite his “literary life” – which would have traced the development of Hughes’s poetic voice by quotation from unpublished writings – as a narrative history, relying heavily on paraphrase of the poet’s private journals in the British Library. The result appears “unauthorised”, however, due to the withdrawal of cooperation by the Hughes estate at a late stage in the research. Evidently, Bate’s aim was to be comprehensive and definitive. To write this life – the first since Elaine Feinstein’s in 2001 – literary scholar Jonathan Bate took notes on “nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts” as well as the “hundred books” he wrote or edited. Hughes was indeed huge: physically (an early partner exclaimed “Ted’s so big and hot!”) and imaginatively. “What / shape am I am I huge” wonders the speaker of his 1967 poem “Wodwo”, named after the mythical wild man of medieval England. Yet this biography leaves the reader haunted by the thought that nothing ever satisfied Hughes’s ambitions, including the many women he seduced. I haven’t had enough sex.” Betjeman’s successor as Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, could hardly have said the same. When asked towards the end of his life if he had any regrets, Sir John Betjeman famously replied: “Yes.
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