Ted Hughes quotes

Ted Hughes was an English poet and children's writer, widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets. His powerful, nature-inspired poetry earned him numerous awards and the position of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He is remembered for his vivid imagery and profound influence on modern literature. Here are 61 of his quotes:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Ted Hughes

The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

Ted Hughes

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.

Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Ted Hughes

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.

Ted Hughes

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Ted Hughes

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.

Ted Hughes

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

Ted Hughes

With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly – I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads – The allotment of death.

Ted Hughes

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.

Ted Hughes

The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.

Ted Hughes

What happened casually remains.

Ted Hughes

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

Ted Hughes

Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow.

Ted Hughes

Sylvia went furthest in the sense that her secret was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can't overestimate her compulsion to write like that. She had to write those things - even against her most vital interests. She died before she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out. She had to tell everybody... like those Native American groups who periodically told everything that was wrong and painful in their lives in the presence of the whole tribe. It was no good doing it in secret; it had to be done in front of everybody else. Maybe that's why poets go to such lengths to get their poems published. It's no good whispering them to a priest or a confessional. And it's not for fame, because they go on doing it after they've learned what fame amounts to. No, until the revelation's actually published, the poet feels no release. In all that, Sylvia was an extreme case, I think.

Ted Hughes

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

Ted Hughes

You are who you choose to be.

Ted Hughes

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Ted Hughes

The wolf is living for the earth.

Ted Hughes

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...

Ted Hughes