name	Ted Hughes
Birth name	Edward James Hughes
birth date	August 17, 1930
birth place	Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England
deathcause	Myocardial infarction (heart attack)
death date	October 28, 1998 (aged 68)
death place	London, England
occupation	Poet, playwright, writer
nationality	English
spouse	Sylvia Plath (m. 1956–1963)Carol Orchard (m. 1970–1998)
partner	Assia Wevill (1962–1969)
children	Frieda HughesNicholas Hughes (deceased)Alexandra Wevill (deceased)
influences	Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot
influenced	Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath }}

Edward James "Ted" Hughes, OM (17 August 193028 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.

Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. His last poetic work, ''Birthday Letters'' (1998), explored their complex relationship. These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem discovered in October 2010, ''Last letter'', describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide.

In 2008 ''The Times'' ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Life and career

Early life

Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd, West Riding of Yorkshire to William Henry and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes and raised among the local farms of the Calder valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes' sister Olwyn was two years his senior and his brother Gerald was older than him by ten years. His mother could trace her ancestry back to William de Ferrières, who came to England with William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Her own father had founded the religious community of Little Gidding. Most of the more recent generations of his family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. Hughes's father, a joiner, had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought at Ypres. 30 000 had joined; nearly half were killed in action. A bullet narrowly escaped killing William Hughes when it lodged in a paybook in his breast pocket. He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes' childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything."

Hughes loved hunting and fishing, swimming and picnicking with his family. He attended the Burnley Road School until he was seven his family moved to Mexborough, South Yorkshire, then attending Schofield Street junior school. His parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop. In ''Poetry in Making'' he recalled that he was fascinated by animals, collecting and drawing toy lead creatures. He acted as retriever when his elder brother gamekeeper shot magpies, owls, rats and curlews, growing up surrounded by the harsh realities of working farms in the valleys and on the moors. During his time in Mexborough he explored Manor Farm at Old Denaby, which he said he would come to know "better than any place on earth". His earliest poem "The Thought Fox", and earliest story "The Rain Horse" were recollections of the area. A close friend at the time, John Wholly, took Hughes to the Crookhill estate above Conisbrough where the boys spent great swathes of time. Hughes became close to the family and learnt a lot about wildlife from Wholly's father, a game keeper. He came to view fishing as an almost religious experience.

Hughes attended Mexborough Grammar School, where a succession of teachers encouraged him to write, and develop his interest in poetry. Teachers Miss McLeod and Pauline Mayne introduced him to the poets Hopkins and Eliot. Hughes was mentored by his sister Olwyn, who was well versed in poetry, and another teacher, John Fisher. Poet Harold Massingham also attended this school and was also mentored by Fisher. In 1946 one of Hughes' early poems, "Wild West" and a short story were published in the grammar school magazine ''The Don and Dearne'', followed by further poems in 1948. By 16 he had no other thought than being a poet.

During the same year Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his National Service first. His two years of National Service (1949–51) passed comparatively easily. Hughes was stationed as a ground wireless mechanic in the RAF on an isolated three-man station in east Yorkshire, a time during which he had nothing to do but "read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of Yeats' poetry.

Career

In 1951, Hughes initially studied English at Pembroke College under M. J. C. Hodhart, an authority on balladic forms. Hughes felt encouraged and supported by Hodhart's supervision, but attended few lectures and wrote no more poetry at this time, feeling stifled by literary academia and the "terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus" of literary tradition. He wrote, "I might say, that I had as much talent for Leavis-style dismantling of texts as anyone else, I even had a special bent for it, nearly a sadistic streak there, but it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself." In his third year he transferred to anthropology and archaeology, both of which would later inform his poetry. He did not excel as a scholar. His first published poetry appeared in ''Chequer''. A poem "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in ''Granta'', under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.

After university, living in London and Cambridge, Hughes went on to have many varied jobs including working as a rose gardener, a night watchman and a reader for the British film company J. Arthur Rank. He also worked in a local zoo, a post that offered plentiful opportunities to observe animals at close quarters. On 26 February 1956, Hughes and his friends held a party to launch ''St. Botolph's Review'', which had a single issue. In it Hughes had four poems. At the party he met the American poet Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had already published extensively, having won various awards, and had come especially to meet Hughes and his fellow poet Lucas Myers. There was a great mutual attraction but they did not meet again for another month, when Plath was passing through London on her way to Paris. She visited him again on her return three weeks later.

Hughes and Plath dated and then were married at St George the Martyr Holborn, on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met. The date, Bloomsday was purposely chosen in honour of James Joyce. Plath's mother was the only wedding guest and she accompanied them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast. Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not relate her history of depression and suicide to him until much later. Reflecting later in ''Birthday Letters'', Hughes commented that early on he could see chasms of difference between himself and Plath, but that in the first years of their marriage they both felt happy and supported, avidly pursuing their writing careers. On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published in ''The Nation'', ''Poetry'' and ''The Atlantic''. Plath typed up Hughes' manuscript for his collection ''Hawk In The Rain'' which went on to win a poetry competition run by the Poetry centre of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York. The first prize was publication by Harper and Hughes garnered widespread critical acclaim with the book's release in September 1957, winning a Somerset Maugham Award. The work favoured hard hitting trochees and spondees reminiscent of middle English over gentile latinate sounds; a style he used throughout his career.

The couple moved to America so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College; during this time Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958 they met Leonard Baskin who would later illustrate many of Hughes' books, including ''Crow''. The couple returned to England, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing, Hughes working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews and talks. During this time he wrote the poems that would be published in ''Wodwo'' (1967) and ''Recklings'' (1966). In March 1960 ''Lupercal'' came out and won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labeled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. He began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices within as shamanism, Buddhism and alchemy, perceiving that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche and poetry was the language of the work.

Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca (1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962) and in 1961, bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In the summer of 1962 Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under a cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962 and she set up life in a new flat with the children.

The death of Plath

Beset by depression, and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963, although it is unclear whether she meant to ultimately succeed. Hughes was devastated. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Some feminists argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide. Plath's gravestone was repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone and attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath." In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name. In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of ''The Guardian'' and ''The Independent''. In ''The Guardian'' on 20 April 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace":

In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early... If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech...The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.

As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including ''Ariel'' (1966). Some critics were dissatisfied by his choice of poem order and omissions in the book and some feminists argued that Hughes had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy. He claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword to ''The Journals of Sylvia Plath'', he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple's young children.

Following Plath's suicide, he wrote two poems "The Howling of Wolves" and "Song of a Rat" and then did not write poetry again for three years. He broadcast extensively, wrote critical essays and became involved in running international poetry festivals in the hopes of connecting English poetry with the rest of the world. In 1966, he wrote poems to accompany Leonard Baskin's illustrations of crows, which became the epic narrative ''The Life and Songs of the Crow'', one of the works for which Hughes is best known.

On 25 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas stove, Assia Wevill committed suicide in the same way. Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965. Their deaths led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. In shock, Hughes could not finish the ''Crow'' sequence, which remained unfinished until the work ''Cave Birds'' was published in 1975. ''Crow'', and the timing of its publication, seemed to underline Hughes's predisposition for dark violence, exemplified by the nature that he wrote about, red in tooth and claw.

1970–1998

In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remained together until his death. He bought the house Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and maintained the property at Court Green. He began cultivating a small farm near Winkleigh called ''Moortown'', a name which became embedded in the title of one of his poetry collections. He later became President of the charity Farms for City Children, established by his friend Michael Morpurgo in Iddesleigh. In October 1970 ''Crow'' was published.

He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, following Sir John Betjeman. Hughes published many works for children and collaborated closely with Peter Brook and the National Theatre Company. He dedicated himself to the Arvon Foundation which promotes writing education and runs residential writing courses at Hughes's home at Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire. In 1993 he made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which included him reading passages from his 1968 novel "The Iron Man".

Hughes was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died. He continued to live at the house in Devon, until suffering a fatal myocardial infarction on 28 October 1998 while undergoing hospital treatment for colon cancer in Southwark, London. His funeral was held on 3 November 1998, at North Tawton church, and he was cremated in Exeter. Speaking at the funeral, fellow poet Séamus Heaney, said: "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken."

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide in his home in Alaska on 16 March 2009 after battling depression.

Work

Hughes' first collection, ''Hawk in the Rain'' (1957) attracted considerable critical acclaim. In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize which brought $5,000. His most significant work is perhaps ''Crow'' (1970), which whilst it has been widely praised also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what sometimes appeared simple, childlike verse.

In a 1971 interview with ''London Magazine'', Hughes cited his main influences as including Blake, Donne, Hopkins and Eliot. He mentioned also Schopenhauer, Robert Graves' book ''The White Goddess'' and ''The Tibetan Book of the Dead''.

Hughes worked for 10 years on a prose poem, "Gaudete", which he hoped to have made into a film. It tells the story of the vicar of an English village who is carried off by elemental spirits, and replaced in the village by his enantiodromic double, a changeling, fashioned from a log, who nevertheless has the same memories as the original vicar. The double is a force of nature who organises the women of the village into a "love coven" in order that he may father a new messiah. When the male members of the community discover what is going on, they murder him. The epilogue consists of a series of lyrics spoken by the restored priest in praise of a nature goddess, inspired by Robert Graves's ''White Goddess''. It was printed in 1977. Hughes was very interested in the relationship between his poetry and the book arts and many of his books were produced by notable presses and in collaborative editions with artists, for instance with Leonard Baskin.

In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. His''Tales from Ovid'' (1997) contains a selection of free verse translations from Ovid's ''Metamorphoses''. He also wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books being ''The Iron Man'', written to comfort his children after Sylvia Plath's suicide. It later became the basis of Pete Townshend's rock opera of the same name, and of the animated film ''The Iron Giant''.

Hughes was appointed as Poet Laureate in 1984 following the death of John Betjeman. It was later known that Hughes was second choice for the appointment. Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, had declined, because of ill health and writer's block. Hughes served in this position until his death in 1998. In 1992 Hughes published ''Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'', a monumental work inspired by Graves' ''The White Goddess''.

In 1998 his ''Tales for Ovid'' won the Whitbread British Book of the Year prizes. In ''Birthday Letters'', his last collection, Hughes broke his silence on Plath, detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time. The book, the cover artwork for which was by their daughter Frieda, won the 1999 Whitbread Prize for poetry.

Hughes' definitive 1,333-page ''Collected Poems'' (Faber & Faber) appeared (posthumously) in 2003. A poem discovered in October 2010, "Last letter", describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide. It was published in ''New Statesman'' on National Poetry Day, October 2010. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy told Channel 4 News that the poem was "the darkest poem he has ever written" and said that for her it was "almost unbearable to read."

In 2011 several previously unpublished letters from Hughes to Craig Raine were published in the literary review Areté. They relate mainly to the process of editing ''Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'', and also contain a sequence of drafts of letters in which Raine attempts to explain to Hughes his disinclination to publish Hughes' poem ''The Cast'' in an anthology he was editing, on the grounds that it might open Hughes to further attack on the subject of Sylvia Plath. "Dear Ted, Thanks for the poem. It is very interesting and would cause a minor sensation" (4 April 1997). The poem was eventually published in ''Birthday Letters'' and Hughes makes a passing reference to this then unpublished collection: "I have a whole pile of pieces that are all – one way or another – little bombs for the studious and earnest to throw at me" (5 April 1997).

Themes

Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar".

The West Riding dialect of Hughes' childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.

Hughes' later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian and ecological viewpoint. He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.

Commemoration and legacy

A memorial walk was inaugurated in 2005, leading from the Devon village of Belstone to Hughes' memorial stone above the River Taw, on Dartmoor.

On 28 April 2011 a memorial plaque for Hughes was unveiled at North Tawton by his wife Carol. At Lumb Bridge near Pecket Well, Calderdale is a plaque, installed by The Elmet Trust, commemorating Hughes' poem "Six Young Men", which was inspired by an old photograph of six young men taken at that spot. The photograph, taken just before the First World War, was of six young men who were all to soon lose their lives in the war. A Ted Hughes Festival is held each year in Mytholmroyd, led by the Elmet Trust, an educational body founded to support the work and legacy of Hughes.

In 2010 it was announced that Hughes would be commemorated with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. On 6 December 2011 a slab of Kirkstone green slate was ceremonially placed at the foot of the memorial commemorating T. S. Eliot. Poet Seamus Heaney and actress Juliet Stevenson gave readings at the ceremony, which was also attended by Hughes' widow Carol and daughter Frieda, and by the poets Simon Armitage, Blake Morrison, Andrew Motion and Michael Morpurgo. Andrew Motion paid tribute to Hughes as "one of the two great poets of the last half of the last century" (the other being Philip Larkin). Hughes' memorial stone bears lines from "That Morning", a poem recollecting the epiphany of a huge shoal of salmon flashing by as he and his son Nicholas waded a stream in Alaska: "So we found the end of our journey / So we stood alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light."

Archive

Hughes archival material is held by institutions such as Emory University, Atlanta and Exeter University. In 2008, The British Library acquired a large collection comprising over 220 files containing manuscripts, letters, journals, personal diaries and correspondence. The library archive is accessible through the British Library website. Inspired by Hughes' ''Crow'' the German painter Johannes Heisig created a large painting series in black and white which was presented to the public for the first time on the occasion of Berlin Museum Long Night in August 2011 at the SEZ Berlin.

Ted Hughes Award

In 2009 the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry was established with the permission of Carol Hughes. The Poetry Society notes "the award is named in honour of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, and one of the greatest twentieth century poets for both children and adults”. Members of the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society recommend a living UK poet who has completed the newest and most innovative work that year, "highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life." The £5,000 prize funded from the annual honorarium that Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy receives as Laureate from The Queen.

Alice Oswald was the inaugural winner in 2010 for her collection ''Weeds and Wildflowers'' (etchings by Jessica Greenman). In 2011 judges Gillian Clarke, Stephen Raw and Jeanette Winterson awarded the award to Kaite O’Reilly for her site specific retelling of Aeschylus’ play, ''The Persians'' (first produced in 472 BCE). Three other poets were short-listed. Christopher Reid worked with director Niall MacCormick to adapt his narrative poem ''The Song of Lunch'' into a 50-minute BBC2 film. David Swann's ''The Privilege of Rain'' (published by Waterloo Press, with wood-cuts by Clare Dunne), is a collection complied following a year as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham (prison). Katharine Towers' ''The Floating Man'' is a debut collection published by Picador.

Selected works

Poetry collections

1957 ''The Hawk in the Rain''

1960 ''Lupercal''

1967 ''Wodwo''

1970 ''Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow''

1972 ''Selected Poems 1957–1967''

1975 ''Cave Birds''

1977 ''Gaudete''

1979 ''Remains of Elmet'' (with photographs by Fay Godwin)

1979 ''Moortown''

1983 ''River''

1986 ''Flowers and Insects''

1989 ''Wolfwatching''

1992 ''Rain-charm for the Duchy''

1994 ''New Selected Poems 1957–1994''

1997 ''Tales from Ovid''

1998 ''Birthday Letters'' — winner of the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 1999 British Book of the Year award.

2003 ''Collected Poems''

Volumes of translation

''Spring Awakening'' by Frank Wedekind

''Blood Wedding'' by Federico García Lorca

1977 ''Amen'' by Yehuda Amichai, Amen, Harper (New York, NY)

1968 ''Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems'' Cape Goliard Press (London, England), revised edition published as Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.

1997 ''Tales from Ovid'' by Ovid Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)

1999 ''The Oresteia'' by Aeschylus, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)

1999 ''Phèdre'' by Jean Racine, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY),

1999 ''Alcestis'' by Euripides, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY)

Anthologies edited by Hughes

''Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson''

''Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath''

''Selected Verse of Shakespeare''

''A Choice of Coleridge's Verse''

''The Rattle Bag'' (edited with Séamus Heaney)

''The School Bag'' (edited with Séamus Heaney)

''By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember''

''Modern Poetry in Translation''

Short story collection

1995 ''The Dreamfighter, and Other Creation Tales'', Faber and Faber, London, England.

1995 ''Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories'', Picador, New York, NY.

Prose

1967 ''Poetry Is,'' Doubleday, New York.

1967 ''Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from "Listening and Writing'', Faber and Faber, London.

1992 ''Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'', Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.

1993 ''A Dancer to God Tributes to T. S. Eliot''. (Ed) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.

1994 ''Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose'', (essay collection) Edited by William Scammell, Faber and Faber (London), Picador USA (New York) 1995.

Books for children

1960 ''The Earth Owl and Other Moon People''

1961 ''Meet my Folks!''

1963 ''How the Whale Became''

1964 ''Nessie the Mannerless Monster''

1967 ''Poetry in the Making''

1968 ''The Iron Man''

1970 ''Coming of the Kings and Other Plays''

1976 ''Season Songs'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)

1976 ''Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin

1978 ''Moon-Bells and Other Poems'' (illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers)

1981 ''Under the North Star'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin)

1986 ''Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth'' (illustrated by Chris Riddell)

1987 ''The Cat and the Cuckoo (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd)

1988 ''Tales of the Early World'' (illustrated by Andrew Davidson)

1993 ''The Iron Woman''

1993 ''The Mermaid's Purse (illustrated by R. J. Lloyd, Sunstone Press)

1995 ''Collected Animal Poems'': Vols. 1–4, Faber & Faber

Plays

''The House of Aries'' (radio play), broadcast, 1960.

''The Calm'' produced in Boston, MA, 1961.

''A Houseful of Women'' (radio play), broadcast, 1961.

''The Wound'' (radio play), broadcast, 1962.

''Difficulties of a Bridegroom'' (radio play), broadcast, 1963.

''Epithalamium'' produced in London, 1963.

''Dogs'' (radio play), broadcast, 1964.

''The House of Donkeys'' (radio play), broadcast, 1965.

''The Head of Gold'' (radio play), broadcast, 1967.

''The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays'' (jbased on juvenile work).

''The Price of a Bride (juvenile, radio play), broadcast, 1966.

Adapted Seneca's ''Oedipus'', produced in London, 1968).

''Orghast'' (with Peter Brook), produced in Persepolis, Iran, 1971.

''Eat Crow'', Rainbow Press, London, England, 1971.

''The Iron Man'', juvenile, televised, 1972.

''Orpheus'', 1973.

Limited editions

''The Burning of the Brothel'' (Turret Books, 1966)

''Recklings'' (Turret Books, 1967)

''Scapegoats and Rabies'' (Poet & Printer, 1967)

''Animal Poems'' (Richard Gilbertson, 1967)

''A Crow Hymn'' (Sceptre Press, 1970)

''The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar'' (Richard Gilbertson, 1970)

''Crow Wakes'' (Poet & Printer, 1971)

''Shakespeare's Poem'' (Lexham Press, 1971)

''Eat Crow'' (Rainbow Press, 1971)

''Prometheus on His Crag'' (Rainbow Press, 1973)

''Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow'' (Illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Faber & Faber, 1973)

''Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter'' (Rainbow Press,1974)

''Cave Birds'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Scolar Press, 1975)

''Earth-Moon'' (illustrated by Ted Hughes, published by Rainbow Press, 1976)

''Eclipse'' (Sceptre Press, 1976)

''Sunstruck'' (Sceptre Press, 1977)

''A Solstice'' (Sceptre Press, 1978)

''Orts'' (Rainbow Press, 1978)

''Moortown Elegies ''(Rainbow Press, 1978)

''The Threshold'' (illustrated by Ralph Steadman, published by Steam Press, 1979)

''Adam and the Sacred Nine'' (Rainbow Press, 1979)

''Four Tales Told by an Idiot'' (Sceptre Press, 1979)

''The Cat and the Cuckoo'' (illustrated by R.J. Lloyd, published by Sunstone Press, 1987)

''A Primer of Birds: Poems'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1989)

''Capriccio'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1990)

''The Mermaid's Purse'' (illustrated by R.J. Lloyd, published by Sunstone Press, 1993)

''Howls and Whispers'' (illustrated by Leonard Baskin, published by Gehenna Press, 1998)

Many of Ted Hughes' poems have been published as limited-edition broadsides.

References

Bibliography

Bell, Charlie. ''Ted Hughes''. Hodder and Stoughton, 2002.

Dirda, Michael. ''Bound to Please'' (pp 17–21). W. W. Norton, 2005.

Feinstein, Elaine. ''Ted Hughes: the life of a poet''. W. W. Norton, 2001.

Gammage, Nick (ed.) ''The Epic Poise: a celebration of Ted Hughes''. Faber and Faber, 1999.

Hadley, Edward. ''The Elegies of Ted Hughes''. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Rees, Roger (ed.) ''Ted Hughes and the Classics''. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Roberts, Neil. ''Ted Hughes: a literary life''. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Sagar, Keith. ''The Art of Ted Hughes''. Cambridge University Press, 1978.

External links

Profiles

Poems and profile at the Poetry Archive. Retrieved 2010-08-13.

Poems and poetry at the Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2010-08-13

Poems and profile at Poets.org

Hughes referenced timeline. Ann Skea

The Elmet Trust. Official Ted Hughes website. Retrieved: 2010-02-22

Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London

The Ted Hughes Society Journal

"Hughes-Plath Family Tree"

Archive

British Library – modern British Collections on Ted Hughes. Retrieved: 2010-02-22

Ted Hughes archive at Emory University. Retrieved: 2012-03-09

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections. Retrieved: 2010-02-22

Category:1930 births Category:1998 deaths Category:20th-century poets Category:Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge Category:British Poets Laureate Category:Cancer deaths in England Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in England Category:Deaths from colorectal cancer Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:English astrologers Category:English children's writers Category:English poets Category:Guardian award winners Category:Members of the Order of Merit Category:People from Mytholmroyd Category:People from Mexborough Category:Sylvia Plath

ar:تيد هيوز ca:Ted Hughes cy:Ted Hughes da:Ted Hughes de:Ted Hughes el:Τεντ Χιούζ es:Ted Hughes eo:Ted Hughes eu:Ted Hughes fa:تد هیوز fr:Ted Hughes ga:Ted Hughes id:Ted Hughes it:Ted Hughes ku:Ted Hughes hu:Ted Hughes mk:Тед Хјуз nl:Ted Hughes ja:テッド・ヒューズ no:Ted Hughes pl:Ted Hughes pt:Ted Hughes ru:Хьюз, Тед simple:Ted Hughes fi:Ted Hughes sv:Ted Hughes tr:Ted Hughes vi:Ted Hughes zh:泰德·休斯

name	Sylvia Plath
alt	A black-and-white photo of a Caucasian woman with shoulder-length hair. She is seated facing the camera, wearing a sweater, with bookshelves behind her.
pseudonym	Victoria Lucas
birth date	October 27, 1932
birth place	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
death date	February 11, 1963
death place	London, England, UK
resting place	Heptonstall Church, West Yorkshire, England, UK
occupation	Poet, novelist, and short story writer
language	English
nationality	American
education	B.A. with highest honors
alma mater	Smith College, Newnham College, Cambridge
period	1960–1963
genre	Autobiography, confessionalism
movement	Confessional poetry
notableworks	''The Bell Jar'' and ''Ariel''
spouse	Ted Hughes (1956–1963)
children	Frieda HughesNicholas Hughes
influences	W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke
influenced	Louise Glück
awards	Fulbright scholarshipWoodrow Wilson Fellowship
signature	Sylvia Plath signature.svg
signature alt	Sylvia Plath
website	}}

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: ''The Colossus and Other Poems'' and ''Ariel''. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for ''The Collected Poems''. She also wrote ''The Bell Jar'', a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

Life and career

Early life

Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906-1994), was a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father Otto Plath (1885-1940), was from Grabow, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and was professor of biology and German at Boston University; he also authored a book about bumblebees. Plath's mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. They met while she was earning her master's degree in teaching and took one of his courses. Otto had become alienated from his family after choosing not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents had intended him to be.

In April 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born and in 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the ''Boston Herald'''s children's section. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian Christian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death, and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. He was buried in Winthrop Cemetery; visiting her father's grave prompted Plath to write the poem ''Electra on Azalea Path''. After his death, Aurelia Plath moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942. In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.

College years

In 1950, Plath attended Smith College and excelled academically. She wrote to her mother, "The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon." She edited ''The Smith Review'' and during the summer after her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at ''Mademoiselle'' magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and it began a downward spiral. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel ''The Bell Jar.'' During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar. Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother's sleeping pills. She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion." She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis ''The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels'' and in June, graduated from Smith with highest honors.

She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper ''Varsity''. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first year winter and spring holidays travelling around the continent.

Career and marriage

In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive), Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:

I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.

Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God". The couple were married on June 16, 1956 at St George the Martyr Holborn in the London Borough of Camden with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija boards. In early 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States and from September 1957 Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write and the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evening took creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck). Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experience and she did so. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Sexton who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to conceive of herself as a more serious, focused poet and short-story writer. At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.

Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the US, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in New York State in the autumn of 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material. The couple moved back to the United Kingdom in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence. Their daughter Frieda was born on 1 April 1960 and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, ''The Colossus''. In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; a number of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel ''The Bell Jar'' and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. Nicholas was born in January 1962. During the summer of 1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.

In 1961, the couple rented their flat at Chalcot Square to Assia and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. He would later write in "Dreamers" (''Birthday Letters'', 1998)

"The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it,"

In June, Plath had had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962 Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Wevill and in September the couple separated.

Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection ''Ariel'' during this time. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.

The winter of 1962 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US) . Her only novel, ''The Bell Jar,'' came out in January 1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.

Death

Dr. John Horder, a close friend who lived near Plath, prescribed her antidepressants a few days before her death. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital and when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Some commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not necessarily have helped. Others say that Plath's American doctor had warned her never again to take the anti-depressant drug which she found worsened her depression but Horder had prescribed it under a proprietary name which she did not recognize.

The nurse was due to arrive at nine o'clock the morning of 11 February 1963 to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat, but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the kitchen, with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels and cloths. At approximately 4:30 am, Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She was 30.

It has been suggested that Plath had not intended to kill herself. That morning she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder", including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Mr. Thomas would have been able to see the note. However, in her biography ''Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath'', Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker wrote, "According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office ... [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven... [and] had really meant to die." Dr. Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No-one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help.

Following death

An inquiry on the day following Plath's death gave a ruling of suicide. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated five months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle, bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the 16th century Buddhist novel ''Journey to the West'' written by Wu Ch'eng-En or to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.

The gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath." When Hughes' partner Assia Wevill killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath; other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name.

In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of ''The Guardian'' and ''The Independent''. In ''The Guardian'' on April 20, 1989 Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."

On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Plath and Hughes, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, following a history of depression.

Works

Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, a poem that appeared in the ''Boston Traveller''. By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over fifty short stories and published in a raft of magazines. At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. She edited the college magazine ''Mademoiselle'' and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for ''Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea''. Later at Newnham, Cambridge, she wrote for the ''Varsity'' magazine. By the time Heinmann published her first collection, ''The Colossus and other poems'' in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in ''Harper's'', ''The Spectator'' and the ''Times Literary Supplement''. All the poems in ''The Colossus'' had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with ''The New Yorker''. It was however her 1965 collection ''Ariel'', published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests.

In 1971, the volumes ''Winter Trees'' and ''Crossing the Water'' were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of ''Ariel''. Writing in ''New Statesman'', fellow poet Peter Porter wrote:

"''Crossing the Water'' is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as ''The Colossus'' or ''Ariel''.

The ''Collected Poems'', published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously. In 2006 Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled ''Ennui''. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in ''Blackbird'', the online journal.

According to Hughes, Plath left behind "some 130 [typed] pages of another novel, provisionally titled ''Double Exposure''. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970."

Reception

''The Colossus'' received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting her voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at ''Punch'' called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi at the ''Manchester Guardian'' said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso' quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets. Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.

It was Hughes' publication of ''Ariel'' in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame. As soon as it was published critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect, and remains so. ''Time'' and ''Life'' both reviewed the slim volume of ''Ariel'' in the wake of her death. The critic at ''Time'' said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to ''Ariel'', that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'"

Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore describes ''Ariel'' as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath’s ''Ariel'' was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified."

The United States Postal Service will introduce a postage stamp featuring Sylvia Plath in 2012.

Themes

Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's ''Lost Son'' sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. ''The Colossus'' is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.

The poems in ''Ariel'' mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book ''Life Studies'' as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death. Posthumously published in 1966, the impact of ''Ariel'' was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as '"Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus". Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who has written about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life." Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes every day elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality.

Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in ''The Bell Jar'' is just that same story." The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatization" and of self-pity. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.

Journals and letters

Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection, ''Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963'', came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of ''The Bell Jar'' in America. Plath had kept a diary from the age of 11 until her death, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1982 as ''The Journals of Sylvia Plath'', edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death.

During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published ''The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath''. More than half of the new volume contained was newly released material; The American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event". Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."

''The Bell Jar''

Plath's semi-autobiographical novel was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971, which her mother wished to block. Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour- it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown.... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen though the distorting lens of a bell jar". She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past". She dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in ''The Bell Jar'' is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel.

Hughes controversy

As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. Hughes has been condemned from some quarters for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it." He lost another journal and an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. In the reams of literary criticism and biography published after their deaths, after the release of new material, biopics, or any old-new controversy, the debate over Plath's literary estate is very often reduced to black and white, that is, whose story the readers choose. Hughes has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.

Still the subject of speculation and approbation, Hughes published ''Birthday Letters'' in 1998, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and subsequent suicide and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, topping best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes was suffering from terminal cancer and would die later that year. It went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread Poetry. The poems, written after her death, in some cases long after, are an account of a failure, circling round a missing centre, trying to find a reason for why she took her own life.

Plath was portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow in the 2003 film ''Sylvia''. Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was two years old when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies. In 2003 she published the poem "My Mother" in ''Tatler'':

Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children

[...] they think I should give them my mother's words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll

List of works

Poetry collections

''The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960, William Heinemann)

''Ariel'' (1961–1965)

''Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices'' (1968)

''Crossing the Water'' (1971)

''Winter Trees'' (1971)

''The Collected Poems'' (1981)

''Selected Poems'' (1985)

''Plath: Poems'' (1998)

''Sylvia Plath Reads'', Harper Audio (2000) (Audio)

Collected prose and novels

''The Bell Jar: A novel'' (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"

''Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963'' (1975)

''Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts'' (1977)

''The Journals of Sylvia Plath'' (1982)

''The Magic Mirror'' (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis

''The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'', edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

Children's books

''The Bed Book'' (1976)

''The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit'' (1996)

''Collected Children's Stories'' (UK, 2001)

''Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen'' (2001)

See also

Sylvia Plath effect

Confessional poetry

Notes

References

Sources

Alexander, Paul. (1991). ''Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath''. New York, NY: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306812991.

Alvarez, Al. (2007). ''Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books''. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780747587446.

Axelrod, Steven Gould. (1992). ''Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. ISBN 080184374X.

Becker, Jillian. (2003). ''Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath''. New York, NY: St Martins Press. ISBN 0312315988.

Brain, Tracy. (2001). ''The Other Sylvia Plath''. Essex: Longman. ISBN 0582327296.

Brain, Tracy. (2006). "Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically." ''Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays''. Ed. Jo Gill. Routledge. ISBN 0415339693.

Butscher, Edward. (2003). ''Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness''. Tucson, Ariz: Schaffner Press. ISBN 0971059829.

Hayman, Ronald. (1991). ''The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath''. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing. ISBN 1559720689.

Helle, Anita (Ed). (2007). ''The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.

Hemphill, Stephanie. (2007). ''Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath''. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 037583799X.

Kyle, Barry. (1976). ''Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait; Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings''. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571106981.

Kirk, Connie Ann. (2004). ''Sylvia Plath: A Biography''. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313332142.

Malcolm, Janet. (1995). ''The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes''. New York, NY: Vintage. ISBN 0679751408.

Middlebrook, Diane. (2003). ''Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—a Marriage''. New York, NY: Viking. ISBN 0670031879.

Steinberg, Peter K. (2004). ''Sylvia Plath''. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House. ISBN 0791078434.

Plath Helle, Anita. (2007). ''The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472069276.

Stevenson, Anne. (1989). ''Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath''. Boston, MD: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395453747.

Wagner, Erica. (2002). ''Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters''. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393323013.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. (2003). ''Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life''. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0333631145.

Wagner-Martin, Linda (Ed). (1988). ''Sylvia Plath (Critical Heritage)''. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415009103.

External links

Hughes and Plath archive at University of Victoria

Plath profile from American Academy of Poets

BBC profile and video. BBC archive. Plath reading "Lady Lazarus" from ''Ariel'' (sound file)

Sylvia Plath drawings at The Mayor Gallery ''The Daily Telegraph''

Essays on Plath by Joyce Carol Oates

''Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies'' (annual) by Indiana University

Sylvia-Plath.org

Category:1932 births Category:1963 deaths Category:20th-century novelists Category:20th-century poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge Category:American child writers Category:American diarists Category:American essayists Category:American expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:American novelists Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American poets Category:American short story writers Category:American Unitarians Category:American women writers Category:American writers of German descent Category:Artists who committed suicide Category:Female suicides Category:Fulbright Scholars Category:Glascock Prize winners Category:Poets who committed suicide Category:Pseudonymous writers Category:Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners Category:Smith College alumni Category:Suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning Category:Suicides in London Category:Women diarists Category:Women novelists Category:Women poets Category:Women short story writers Category:Writers from Boston, Massachusetts Category:Writers who committed suicide

af:Sylvia Plath ar:سيلفيا بلاث zh-min-nan:Sylvia Plath be:Сільвія Плат bg:Силвия Плат ca:Sylvia Plath cs:Sylvia Plath cy:Sylvia Plath da:Sylvia Plath de:Sylvia Plath et:Sylvia Plath el:Σύλβια Πλαθ es:Sylvia Plath eo:Sylvia Plath eu:Silvia Plath fa:سیلویا پلات fr:Sylvia Plath ga:Sylvia Plath gl:Sylvia Plath ko:실비아 플래스 hr:Sylvia Plath ilo:Sylvia Plath id:Sylvia Plath is:Sylvia Plath it:Sylvia Plath he:סילביה פלאת' ka:სილვია პლათი ku:Sylvia Plath hu:Sylvia Plath mk:Силвија Плат ml:സിൽവിയ പ്ലാത്ത് nl:Sylvia Plath ja:シルヴィア・プラス no:Sylvia Plath pl:Sylvia Plath pt:Sylvia Plath ro:Sylvia Plath ru:Плат, Сильвия sq:Sylvia Plath simple:Sylvia Plath sk:Sylvia Plathová sh:Sylvia Plath fi:Sylvia Plath sv:Sylvia Plath ta:சில்வியா பிளாத் tg:Силвия Плат tr:Sylvia Plath uk:Сильвія Плат vi:Sylvia Plath war:Sylvia Plath yo:Sylvia Plath zh:希薇亞·普拉斯

Name	Bill Drummond
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	William Ernest Drummond
Alias	King Boy DTime BoyTenzing Scott Brown
Born	April 29, 1953, Butterworth, South Africa
Origin	Newton Stewart, Scotland
Occupation	ArtistWriterMusicianMusic industry managerTheatre Set DesignerCarpenter
Years active	1975–
Label	Zoo RecordsWEACreation RecordsKLF Communications
Associated acts	Big in JapanLori & The ChameleonsThe Justified Ancients of Mu-MuThe TimelordsThe KLFK FoundationThe One World Orchestra2KThe17
Website	Penkiln Burn The17 Mydeath The Open Manifesto Curfew Tower }}

William Ernest Drummond (born 29 April 1953, Butterworth, South Africa) is a Scottish artist, musician, writer and record producer. He was the co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with which he burned a million pounds in 1994. More recent art activities, carried out under Drummond's chosen banner of the Penkiln Burn, include making and distributing cakes, soup, flowers, beds and shoe-shines. More recent music projects include No Music Day, and the international tour of a choir called The17. Drummond is the author of several books about art and music.

Background

Bill Drummond was born in Butterworth, South Africa, where his father was a minister for the Church of Scotland. His family moved back to Scotland when he was 18 months old, and his early years were spent in the town of Newton Stewart, moving on to Corby in Northamptonshire at the age of 11. It was here he first became involved in performing as a musician working initially with school friends including Gary Carson and Chris Ward. He attended Northampton and Liverpool Schools of Art from 1970 to 1973. Following this, he decided that "art should use everything, be everywhere" and that as an artist he would "use whatever medium is to hand". He then spent two years doing various jobs including being a milkman, gardener, steel worker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter and scene painter.

Career

1970s: ''Illuminatus'', Big in Japan, and Zoo

In 1975 Drummond began working at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool as a carpenter and scene painter. In 1976 he was the set designer for the first stage production of ''The Illuminatus Trilogy'', a 12-hour performance which opened on 23 November 1976, and which was staged by Ken Campbell's "Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool". This production then transferred to the National Theatre in London. According to Campbell, Drummond became known as "the man who went for Araldite": "In the middle of a tour, Drummond announced he was popping out to get some glue - and never returned."

Drummond's musical career began in 1977 with Big in Japan, a band whose membership also included future luminaries Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood), Budgie (Siouxsie and the Banshees), Jayne Casey (Pink Military/Pink Industry) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). After the band's demise, Drummond and another member David Balfe started Zoo Records, their first release being Big in Japan's posthumous EP, ''From Y To Z and Never Again''. They went on to act as producers of the debut albums by Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, both of which Drummond would later manage somewhat idiosyncratically. With Zoo Music Ltd, Drummond and Balfe were also music publishers for Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction and The Proclaimers. The production team of Drummond and Balfe was christened The Chameleons, who recorded the single "Touch" together with a female singer as Lori and the Chameleons.

1980s: A&R; man & solo recording artist

Drummond later took a job in the mainstream music business as an A&R; consultant for the label WEA working with Strawberry Switchblade and Brilliant. In July 1986, on his 33 and a third birthday, Drummond repented his corporate involvement and resigned his job by way of a "ringingly quixotic press release": "I will be 33.5 (sic) years old in September, a time for a revolution in my life. There is a mountain to climb the hard way, and I want to see the world from the top..." (In an interview in December 1990, Drummond recalled spending half a million pounds at WEA on the band Brilliant - for whom he envisioned massive worldwide success - only for them to completely flop. "At that point I thought 'What am I doing this for?' and I got out.")

Drummond was "obviously very sharp," said WEA chairman Rob Dickens, "and he knew the business. But he was too radical to be happy inside a corporate structure. He was better off working as an outsider."

Later in the year, Drummond issued a solo album, ''The Man'', a country/folk music recording, backed by Australian rock group The Triffids. The album was released on Creation Records and was perhaps most notable for the sardonic "Julian Cope Is Dead", where he outlined his fantasy of shooting the Teardrop Explodes frontman in the head to ensure the band's early demise and subsequent legendary status. The song has commonly been seen as a reply to the Cope song "Bill Drummond Said". As a B-side, Drummond wrote and recorded "The Manager" in which he lamented the state of the music industry and offered his services to help fix it.

''The Man'' received positive reviews - including 4 stars from ''Q Magazine''; and 5 from ''Sounds'' Magazine who called the album a "touching if idiosyncratic biographical statement". Drummond intended to focus on writing books once ''The Man'' had been issued but, as he recalled in 1990, "That only lasted three months, until I had an[other] idea for a record and got dragged back into it all".

1987-1992: The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords and The KLF

While out walking on New Years Day 1987, Drummond formulated a plan to make a hip-hop record. However, "I wasn't brave enough to go and do it myself", he said. "...although I can play the guitar, and I can knock out a few things on the piano, I knew nothing, personally, about the technology. And, I thought, I knew Jimmy [Cauty], I knew he was a like spirit, we share similar tastes and backgrounds in music and things. So I phoned him up that day and said "Let's form a band called The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu". And he knew exactly, to coin a phrase, "where I was coming from".

Drummond and Cauty (who Drummond had signed to Food/WEA as a member of Brilliant) released their first single, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu's "All You Need Is Love", in March 1987. This was followed by an album - ''1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)'' - in June of the same year, and a high-profile copyright dispute with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society. A second and final album by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) - ''Who Killed The JAMs?'' was released in February 1988.

Later in 1988, Drummond and Cauty released a 'novelty' pop single, "Doctorin' the Tardis" as The Timelords. The song reached number one in the UK Singles Chart on 12 June, and charted highly in Australia and New Zealand. On the back of this success, the duo self-published a book, ''The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)''.

In March 1988, the duo regrouped as The KLF and released their first singles under this moniker, "Burn the Bastards" and "Burn the Beat". (From late 1987, Drummond and Cauty's independent record label had been named "KLF Communications".) As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty would amass fame and fortune. "What Time Is Love?" - a signature song which they would revisit and revitalise several times in the coming years - saw its first release in July 1988, and its success spawned an album, ''The "What Time Is Love?" Story'', in September 1989. ''Chill Out'', an ambient house album which had its roots in Cauty's chill-out sessions with The Orb's Alex Paterson, was released in February 1990. Described by ''The Times'' as "The KLF's comedown classic", ''Chill Out'' was named the fifth best dance album of all time in a 1996 ''Mixmag'' feature.

The KLF's commercial success peaked in 1991, with ''The White Room'' album and the accompanying "Stadium House" singles, remixes of 1988's "What Time Is Love?", 1989's "3 a.m. Eternal", 1990's "Last Train to Trancentral"; and "Justified and Ancient", a new song based on a sample from ''1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)''.

In 1992, The KLF were awarded the "Best British group" BRIT Award. With grindcore group Extreme Noise Terror, The KLF performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 a.m. Eternal" at the BRIT Awards ceremony in front of "a stunned music-business audience". Later in the evening Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep with the message "I died for ewe—bon appetit [sic]" tied around its waist at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties. ''NME'' listed this appearance at number 4 in their "top 100 rock moments", and, in 2003, ''The Observer'' named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.

On 14 May 1992, The KLF announced their immediate retirement from the music industry and the deletion of their ''entire'' back catalogue, an act which associate Scott Piering described as "[throwing] away a fortune". As when he left WEA, Drummond issued an enigmatic press release, this time talking of a "wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path" he and Cauty had been following "...these past five years. The last two of which has [sic] led us up onto the commercial high ground—we are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what." There have been numerous suggestions that in 1992 Drummond was at the edge of a nervous breakdown. ''Vox'' Magazine wrote, for example, that 1992 was "the year of Bill's 'breakdown', when The KLF, perched on the peak of greater-than-ever success, quit the music business, ... [and] machine gunned the tuxedo'd twats in the front row of that year's BRIT Awards ceremony." Drummond himself said that he was on the edge of the "abyss".

1993-1997: K Foundation, burning one million pounds, and other activities with Jimmy Cauty

Despite The KLF's retirement from the music business, Drummond's involvement with Jimmy Cauty was far from over. In 1993, the pair regrouped as the K Foundation, ostensibly a foundation for the arts. They established the K Foundation art award for the "''worst'' artist of the year". The award, worth £40,000, was presented to Rachel Whiteread on 23 November 1993 outside London's Tate Gallery. Ms Whiteread had just accepted the £20,000 1993 Turner Prize award for best British Contemporary artist inside the gallery. The K Foundation award attracted huge interest from the British broadsheet newspapers.

Infamy followed when, on 23 August 1994, the K Foundation burnt what remained of The KLF's earnings - one million pounds sterling - at a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. A film of the event - ''Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid'' - was taken on tour, with Drummond and Cauty discussing the incineration with members of the public after each screening. In 2004 Drummond admitted to the BBC that he now regretted burning the money. "It's a hard one to explain to your kids and it doesn't get any easier. I wish I could explain why I did it so people would understand."

On 4 September 1995 the duo recorded "The Magnificent" for ''The Help Album''. In 1997, Drummond and Cauty briefly re-emerged as 2K and K2 Plant Hire Ltd. with various plans to "Fuck the Millennium". K2 Plant Hire's published aim was to "build a massive pyramid containing one brick for every person born in the UK during the 20th century" Members of the public were urged to donate bricks, with 1.5 bricks per Briton being needed to complete the project. Drummond also contributed a short story titled "Let’s Grind, or How K2 Plant Hire Ltd Went to Work" to the book "Disco 2000".

Art Activities and the Penkiln Burn

Drummond studied painting at Liverpool School of Art from 1972 to 1973. Following that, he decided that instead of limiting his practice to paint and canvas, as an artist he would use any medium that came to hand. He has said that much of his work since - including the pop-music, book-writing, and The17 choir - has been done as art.

From 1998, Drummond's art activities have been carried out using the brand-name of the Penkiln Burn. This is the name of the river in Scotland upon the banks of which he played and fished as a boy.

In 1995, Drummond bought ''A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind'' by Richard Long, for $20,000. In Drummond’s own words, he ‘fell in love with Richard Long’s work because’ “it was art by walking and doing things on his walks.” Five years later, Drummond felt that he was no longer "getting his money's worth" from the photograph. He decided to try to sell it by placing a series of placards around the country. When this failed to result in its sale, in 2001 he cut the photograph and mounting card into 20,000 pieces to sell for $1 each. His plan, upon retrieving the $20,000 in cash, is to walk with it to the remote place in Iceland where Richard Long had made the photograph and bury it in a box beneath the stone circle. He will then take his own photograph of the site, bring it home, frame it, hang it in the same place in his bedroom where the Richard Long hung, and call the new work ''The Smell of Money Underground''. Drummond's books ''How to be an Artist'' and a later soft-bound edition titled ''$20,000'' recounts this story.

In 2002, Drummond was involved in a controversial exhibition at the deconsecrated St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Liverpool. Drummond contributed a guestbook which asked visitors "Is God a Cunt?". It was later reported that the artwork had been stolen and a £1000 reward offered for its return. Drummond himself said that he would answer "no" to his own question: "God is responsible for all the things I love, the speckles on a brown trout; the sound of Angus Young's guitar, the nape of my girlfriend's neck, the song of the blackcap when he returns in Spring. I never blame God for all the shit, for the baby Rwandan slaughtered in a casual genocide, the ever-present wars, drudgery and misery that fills most of our lives."

Several Penkiln Burn projects involve making things and then distributing them. Drummond has created a Soup Line drawn across a map going through Belfast and Nottingham to the edges of the British Isles. Anyone living on the Soup Line may contact Drummond to come to their house and make soup for them, their family and friends. Drummond has also constructed - and encourages others to construct - Cake Circles drawn on maps. Cakes are then made and delivered to people who live within the circle with the words "I have baked you a cake, here it is". Other projects involve Drummond building beds from timber in public places which are then raffled off. In 2011, for the Venice Biennale, Drummond took up shoe-shining on the streets of Venice. Each spring, Drummond gives away 40 bunches of daffodils to strangers on the street in different cities.

Drummond's web-based projects include MyDeath.net, where people can plan their own funeral. Another site, youwhores.com, was meant for anyone to advertise any kind of service at their own set price. Due to misuse though, youwhores.com has become archival only. Still open for contributions is Drummond's website www.openmanifesto.com which "exists to define what art is and art is not." The Open Manifesto site invites definitions of art in 100 words or less.

Drummond was a Director of The Foundry, an arts centre in Shoreditch, London which closed in 2010. He is also owner of The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. Via an arts trust called In You We Trust, the Curfew Tower acts as an artists' residency.

1993 onwards: Music

With Jimmy Cauty, Bill Drummond announced his retirement from pop-music with a dramatic performance involving deactivated machine guns, a dead sheep and a grindcore version of the KLF hit 3am Eternal at the MTV award ceremony in 1993. His involvement in the music industry more widely has been minimal since his final collaboration with Jimmy Cauty as 2K in 1997.

In 1998, the Scottish Football Association invited Drummond to write and record a theme song for the Scotland national football team's 1998 FIFA World Cup campaign. Drummond decided against doing it (Del Amitri got the job) but he wondered if he had twisted fate by declining, because the other major football songs of that year were made by associates of his: Keith Allen ("Vindaloo") and Ian Broudie ("Three Lions"), two men he had met on the same day when working on ''Illuminatus!'' in 1976, and former protege Ian McCulloch.

In 2000, Drummond released ''45'', a book consisting of a "series of loosely related vignettes forming the rambling diary of one year." ''45'' also explored Drummond's KLF legacy, and was well received by the press.

No Music Day

In 2005, Drummond announced an annual No Music Day on the 21st November. The 22nd November is Saint Cecilia day - the Patron Saint of Music - so No Music Day represents a fast before the feast. No Music Day was held between 2005 and 2010. In this time, Radio BBC Scotland observed it by broadcasting no music, including jingles, for 24 hours. Radio Resonance FM also acknowledged it. In 2009 the entire city of Linz, Austria observed No Music Day with the backing of the city mayor; music was not played on local radio stations or in shops, and the cinemas only showed films without music soundtracks. No Music Day is documented at www.nomusicday.com

The17

Drummond's most recent music project is a choir called The17. His first formal performance of The17 was staged with 16 other men in a studio in Leicester in 2004. It followed thoughts about music that Drummond had been having for many years. With the advent of recorded music via the internet, ipods and MP3 players etc Drummond proclaims that "all recorded music has run its course." The17 creates music that follows no musical history, or necessarily has words, melodies or rhythms. It may be made up of many human voices or none. Performances may only be recorded and played back once and then deleted. The17 can be made up of as many people who want to be a part of it at the time of a performance; they are all then lifetime members.

The17 now has several thousand members who have carried out performances on Drummond's Coast-to-Coast tour across the UK, and a World Tour which has included Jerusalem, Beijing, Port-au-Prince and Gothenberg. The17 is the subject of the 2008 book ''17'' published by Beautiful Books. Performances, scores, tours and Drummond's related graffiti are documented on a website: the17.org.

A performance of the 17's SURROUND, originally planned to take place in Damascus, Syria, will take place in London on March 18th, 2012. Drummond explains in his essay for Treuchet Magazine: 'it would best for all concerned if the Syrian leg of the tri-nation festival was postponed for a few weeks or maybe months, when things would have undoubtedly settled down'. Drummond plans to end his association with The17 on 28 April 2013 – the day before he turns 60.

Reviews, accolades and criticism

In 1993, ''Select'' magazine published a list of the 100 Coolest People in Pop. Drummond was number one on the list. "What has this giant of coolness not achieved?", they asked: "Like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Drummond has always been a step ahead of human evolution, guiding us on. Manager of The Teardrop Explodes, co-inventor of ambient and trance house, number one pop star, situationist pagan, folk troubadour, pan-dimensional zenarchist gentleman of leisure...and then, ladies and gentlemen, he THROWS IT ALL AWAY, machine-guns the audience and dumps a dead sheep on the doorstep of the Brit Awards and vanishes to build dry-stone walls. His new 'band' The K Foundation make records but say they won't release them at all until world peace is established. Deranged, inspired, intensely cool.

Also in 1993, an ''NME'' piece about the K Foundation found much to praise in Drummond's career, from Zoo Records through to the K Foundation art award: "Bill Drummond's career is like no other... there's been cynicism... and there's been care (no one who didn't love pop music could have made a record so commercial and so Pet Shop Boys-lovely as 'Kylie Said to Jason', or the madly wonderful 'Last Train to Trancentral', or the Tammy Wynette version of 'Justified and Ancient'). There's been mysticism... But most of all there's been a belief that, both in music and life, there's something more."

Charles Shaar Murray wrote in ''The Independent'' that "[Bill] Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes... involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician..."

In 2001, NME readers voted "the KLF's Art Terrorism" at the Brit Awards in 1992 at number 4 in the "top 100 Rock moments of all time." NME also ranked Drummond as number 17 in its 20 "Greatest Cult Heroes" in 2010.

Art Review's artworld "Power 100" listed Drummond as number 98 in 2003.

''Trouser Press'' has referred to Drummond as a "high-concept joker"; and Britain's ''The Sun'' has called him a "madcap Scots genius".

In 2006, Drummond's book "45" was ranked 21 in the Observer's list of "The 50 greatest music books ever". Kitty Empire of the Guardian included "45" in her list of "10 best music memoirs". in 2010. "45" also features in a 2010 book list compiled by Belle & Sebastian.

BBC Radio 1 in 2006 included Drummond in a survey of "Most Punk Persons".

Virgin Media ranked Drummond at number 8 in a list of "Most Eccentric Musicians" and freakytrigger.com polled him as the fourth "most intelligent person in pop".

Drummond's 1986 solo album "The Man" is among Uncut Magazine's 2010 list of "Greatest Lost Albums".

Artistic output

Discography (solo)

''The Man'' (Creation Records, 1986)

''The King Of Joy'' (Creation Records, 1986)

Exhibitions

''Ragworts'' (Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2012)

Bibliography

''The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)'', with Jimmy Cauty as The Timelords (KLF Publications, 1988)

''Bad Wisdom'', with Mark Manning (Penguin Books, 1996; Creation Books, 2003)

''From the Shores of Lake Placid and other stories'' (Ellipsis, 1998)

''Annual Report to The Mavericks, Writers And Film Festival'' (Penkiln Burn, 1998)

''45'' (Penkiln Burn, 2000)

''How To Be An Artist'' (Penkiln Burn, 2002)

''Wild Highway'', with Mark Manning (Creation Books, 2005)

''Scores 18-76'' (Penkiln Burn, 2006)

''17'' (Beautiful Books, 2008)ISBN 9781905636266

''$20,000'' (Penkiln Burn, 2010 - second edition of ''How To Be An Artist'') (Beautiful Books Limited (UK), 2010) ISBN

9781905636846

''Man Makes Bed'' (Penkiln Burn 2011)

''Imajine'' by Claudel Casseus with Introduction by Bill Drummond (Penkiln Burn, 2011)

''Man Shines Shoes'' (Penkiln Burn, 2011)

''Ragworts'' (Penkiln Burn, 2012)

Football

Bill Drummond is a fan of Scottish football club Queen of the South which he says is due to their proximity to his home town of Newton Stewart. "Queen of the South" is also the title of the 6th track on his 1986 album "The man".

Notes and references

Category:The KLF Category:Conceptual artists Category:Creation Records artists Category:Scottish record producers Category:Scottish electronic musicians Category:Scottish folk musicians Category:Scottish keyboardists Category:Scottish music managers Category:Scottish non-fiction writers Category:Scottish short story writers Category:People from the Eastern Cape Category:People from Newton Stewart Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:Scouse culture of the early 1980s

es:Bill Drummond sv:Bill Drummond

name	William Blake
birth date	November 28, 1757
birth place	London, England
death date	August 12, 1827
death place	London, England
occupation	Writer(poet), painter, printmaker
spouse	Catherine Blake (1782–1831)
movement	Romanticism
genre	Visionary, poetry
notableworks	''Songs of Innocence and of Experience'', ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'', ''The Four Zoas'', ''Jerusalem'', ''Milton a Poem'', ''And did those feet in ancient time''
influences	The Bible, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Emanuel Swedenborg, Jakob Böhme, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Fuseli
influenced	Samuel Palmer, William Butler Yeats, Northrop Frye, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hart Crane, Kahlil Gibran, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Patti Smith, Raoul Vaneigem, John Gardner, Clive Barker, Kenzaburo Oe, Paulo Coelho, Jim Morrison, Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan, Ben Okri }}

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".

Early life

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St) in the Soho district of London. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Blake's father, James, was a hosier. William attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of ten, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. The Blakes were Dissenters, and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian Church. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life.

Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was then preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk and Albrecht Dürer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake was also making explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.

Apprenticeship to Basire

On 4 August 1772, Blake became apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, for the term of seven years. At the end of this period, at the age of 21, he was to become a professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the period of Blake's apprenticeship. However, Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake was later to add Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries—and then cross it out. This aside, Basire's style of engraving was of a kind held to be old-fashioned at the time, and Blake's instruction in this outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London (perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice). His experiences in Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies, and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that "...the most immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour". In the long afternoons Blake spent sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by the boys of Westminster School, one of whom "tormented" Blake so much one afternoon that he knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence". Blake beheld more visions in the Abbey, of a great procession of monks and priests, while he heard "the chant of plain-song and chorale."

Royal Academy

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty". Reynolds wrote in his ''Discourses'' that the "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit". Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much from the president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater value than landscape and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his ideals into practice." Certainly Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, submitting works on six occasions between 1780 and 1808.

Blake became friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland during his first year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining the Society for Constitutional Information.

Gordon Riots

Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that in June 1780 Blake was walking towards Basire's shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison in London. They attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze, and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during this attack. These riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, later came to be known as the Gordon Riots. They provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, as well as the creation of the first police force.

Despite Gilchrist's insistence that Blake was "forced" to accompany the crowd, some biographers have argued that he accompanied it impulsively, or supported it as a revolutionary act. In contrast, Jerome McGann argues that the riots were reactionary, and that events would have provoked "disgust" in Blake.

Marriage and early career

Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782. At the time, Blake was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity me?" When she responded affirmatively, he declared, "Then I love you." Blake married Catherine – who was five years his junior – on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary's Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an 'X'. The original wedding certificate may still be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982. Later, in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she would prove an invaluable aid to him, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.

Blake's first collection of poems, ''Poetical Sketches'', was printed around 1783. After his father's death, William and former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a print shop in 1784, and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson's house was a meeting-place for some of the leading English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Richard Price, artist John Henry Fuseli, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the French revolution and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France. In 1784 Blake also composed his unfinished manuscript ''An Island in the Moon''.

Blake illustrated ''Original Stories from Real Life'' (1788; 1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence proving without doubt that they actually met. In 1793's ''Visions of the Daughters of Albion'', Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

Relief etching

In 1788, at the age of 31, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, a method he would use to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name).

This is a reversal of the normal method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching (which Blake also referred to as "stereotype" in ''The Ghost of Abel'') was intended as a means for producing his illuminated books more quickly than via intaglio. Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast from a wood engraving, but Blake’s innovation was, as described above, very different. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including ''Songs of Innocence and Experience'', ''The Book of Thel'', ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'', and ''Jerusalem''.

Engravings

Although Blake has become most famous for his relief etching, his commercial work largely consisted of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the 18th century in which the artist would incise an image into the copper plate. This was a complex and laborious process, with plates taking months or years to complete, but as Blake's contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such engraving offered a "missing link with commerce", enabling artists to connect with a mass audience and so becoming an immensely important activity by the end of the 18th century.

Blake also employed intaglio engraving in his own work, most notably for the illustrations of the Book of Job, completed just before his death. Most critical work has tended to concentrate on Blake's relief etching as a technique because it is the most innovative aspect of his art, but a 2009 study draws attention to Blake's surviving plates, including those for the Book of Job: these demonstrate that he made frequent use of a technique known as "repoussage", a means of obliterating mistakes by hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate. Such techniques, typical of engraving work of the time, are very different to the much faster and fluid way of drawing on a plate that Blake employed for his relief etching, and indicates why the engravings took so long to complete.

Later life and career

Blake's marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. Blake taught Catherine to write, and she helped him to colour his printed poems. Gilchrist refers to "stormy times" in the early years of the marriage. Some biographers have suggested that Blake tried to bring a concubine into the marriage bed in accordance with the beliefs of the more radical branches of the Swedenborgian Society, but other scholars have dismissed these theories as conjecture. William and Catherine's first daughter and last child might be Thel described in ''The Book of Thel'' who was conceived as dead.

Felpham

In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex (now West Sussex) to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake began ''Milton: a Poem'' (the title page is dated 1804 but Blake continued to work on it until 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning "And did those feet in ancient time," which became the words for the anthem, "Jerusalem". Over time, Blake came to resent his new patron, coming to believe that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry, and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" (E724). Blake's disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced ''Milton: a Poem'', in which Blake wrote that "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies." (4:26, E98)

Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier called John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but also with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed, "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake would be cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "The invented character of [the evidence] was ... so obvious that an acquittal resulted." Schofield was later depicted wearing "mind forged manacles" in an illustration to ''Jerusalem''.

Return to London

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate ''Jerusalem'' (1804–1820), his most ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'', Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing that Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly commissioned Blake's friend Thomas Stothard to execute the concept. When Blake learned that he had been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard. He also set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled ''The Canterbury Pilgrims''), along with other works. As a result he wrote his ''Descriptive Catalogue'' (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a "brilliant analysis" of Chaucer. It is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. It also contained detailed explanations of his other paintings.

The exhibition itself, however, was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review, in ''The Examiner'', was hostile.

Also around this time (circa 1808) Blake gave vigorous expression of views on art in an extensive series of polemical annotations to the ''Discourses'' of Sir Joshua Reynolds, denouncing the British Academy as a fraud and proclaiming, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot."

In 1818 he was introduced by George Cumberland's son to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. This group shared Blake's rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. At the age of 65 Blake began work on illustrations for the ''Book of Job''. These works were later admired by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan Williams, who based his ballet ''Job: A Masque for Dancing'' on a selection of the illustrations.

Later in his life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit; this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

Dante's ''Divine Comedy''

The commission for Dante's ''Divine Comedy'' came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the ultimate aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise, and only a handful of the watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Even so, they have evoked praise:

:'[T]he Dante watercolours are among Blake's richest achievements, engaging fully with the problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of being in the poem'. Blake's illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works, but rather seem to critically revise, or furnish commentary on, certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.

Because the project was never completed, Blake's intent may itself be obscured. Some indicators, however, bolster the impression that Blake's illustrations in their totality would themselves take issue with the text they accompany: In the margin of ''Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions'', Blake notes, "Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost." Blake seems to dissent from Dante's admiration of the poetic works of ancient Greece, and from the apparent glee with which Dante allots punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).

At the same time, Blake shared Dante's distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power, and clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante's work pictorially. Even as he seemed to near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante's ''Inferno''; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.

Death

On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:

Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five days after his death – on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary – at the Dissenter's burial ground in Bunhill Fields, where his parents were also interred. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine moved into Tatham's house as a housekeeper. During this period, she believed she was regularly visited by Blake's spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but would entertain no business transaction without first "consulting Mr. Blake". On the day of her own death, in October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him "as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now".

On her death, Blake's manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned several he deemed heretical or politically radical. Tatham was an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist movements of the 19th century, and was severely opposed to any work that smacked of blasphemy. Also, John Linnell erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake's drawings.

Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake's grave had been lost and forgotten, while gravestones were taken away to create a new lawn. Nowadays, Blake’s grave is commemorated by a stone that reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757–1827 and his wife Catherine Sophia 1762–1831". This memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres away from the actual spot of Blake’s grave, which is not marked. However, members of the group Friends of William Blake have rediscovered the location of Blake's grave and intend to place a permanent memorial at the site.

Blake is now recognised as a saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey, in memory of him and his wife.

Politics

Blake was not active in any well-established political party. His poetry consistently embodies an attitude of rebellion against the abuse of class power as documented in David Erdman's large study ''Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times''. Blake was both concerned about senseless wars of kingdoms, and the blighting effects of the industrial revolution. Much of his poetry recounts in symbolic allegory the effects of the French and American revolutions. Erdman claims that Blake was disillusioned with these revolutions, believing they had simply replaced monarchy with irresponsible mercantilism. Erdman also notes that Blake was deeply opposed to slavery, and believes that some poems of Blake read primarily as championing "free love" have had their anti-slavery implications short-changed. One of the more recent (and very short) studies of Blake, ''William Blake: Visionary Anarchist'' by Peter Marshall (1988), has classified Blake as one of the forerunners of modern anarchism, along with Blake's contemporary William Godwin. The British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson's last finished work was a study on William Blake, ''Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law'' (1993), and it shows how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War.

Development of Blake's views

Because Blake's later poetry contains a private mythology with complex symbolism, his late work has been less published than his earlier more accessible work. The recent Vintage anthology of Blake edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work, as do many critical studies such as ''William Blake'' by D. G. Gillham.

The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character and can be seen as a protestation against dogmatic religion. This is especially notable in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' in which the figure represented by Satan is virtually the hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In the later works such as ''Milton'' and ''Jerusalem'', Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards what he felt was the rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. Not all readers of Blake agree upon how much continuity exists between Blake's earlier and later works.

Psychoanalyst June Singer has written that Blake's late work displayed a development of the ideas that were first introduced in his earlier works, namely, the humanitarian goal of achieving personal wholeness of body and spirit. The final section of the expanded edition of her Blake study ''The Unholy Bible'' suggests that the later works are in fact the "Bible of Hell" promised in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. Regarding Blake's final poem "Jerusalem", she writes: "[T]he promise of the divine in man, made in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'', is at last fulfilled."

However, John Middleton Murry notes discontinuity between ''Marriage'' and the late works, in that while the early Blake focused on a "sheer negative opposition between Energy and Reason", the later Blake emphasised the notions of self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the road to interior wholeness. This renunciation of the sharper dualism of ''Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' is evidenced in particular by the humanisation of the character of Urizen in the later works. Middleton characterises the later Blake as having found "mutual understanding" and "mutual forgiveness".

Sexuality

19th-century "free love" movement

Since his death, William Blake has been claimed by various movements who apply his complex and often elusive use of symbolism and allegory to the issues that concern them. In particular, Blake is sometimes considered (along with Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin) a forerunner of the subsequent 19th-century "free love" movement, a broad reform tradition starting in the 1820s that held that marriage is slavery, and advocated for removal of all state restrictions on sexual activity such as homosexuality, prostitution, and adultery, culminating in the birth control movement of the early 20th century. Blake scholarship was more focused on this theme in the earlier 20th century than today, although it is still mentioned today notably by the Blake scholar Magnus Ankarsjö who moderately challenges this interpretation. The 19th-century "free love" movement was not particularly focused on the idea of multiple partners, but did agree with Wollstonecraft that state-sanctioned marriage was "legal prostitution" and was monopolistic in character. It has somewhat more in common with early feminist movements (particularly with regard to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Blake admired).

Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine's apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house. His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as "Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?" and "Earth's Answer" seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. His poem "London" speaks of "the Marriage-Hearse". ''Visions of the Daughters of Albion'' is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In ''Visions'', Blake writes:

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)

In the 19th-century famed poet and free love advocate Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a full-length book on Blake drawing attention to the above motifs in which Blake praises "sacred natural love" that is not bound by another's possessive jealousy, the latter characterised by Blake as a "creeping skeleton". Swinburne also notes how Blake's ''Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' condemns the hypocrisy of the "pale religious letchery" of advocates of traditional norms. Another 19th-century free love advocate, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), was also influenced by Blake's mystical emphasis on energy free from external restrictions.

In the early 20th-century Pierre Berger described how Blake's views echo that of Mary Wollstonecraft celebrating joyful authentic love rather than love born of duty, the former being the true measure of purity. Irene Langridge notes that "in Blake's mysterious and unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was something Blake wanted for the edification of 'the soul'." Michael Davis's 1977 book ''William Blake a New Kind of Man'' suggests that Blake thought jealousy separates man from the divine unity, condemning him to a frozen death.

As a theological writer, Blake has a sense of human “fallenness”. S. Foster Damon has noted that for Blake the major impediments to a free love society were corrupt human nature, not merely the intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic hypocritical nature of human communication. Thomas Wright's 1928 book ''Life of William Blake'' (entirely devoted to Blake's doctrine of free love) notes that Blake thinks marriage should ''in practice'' afford the joy of love, but notes that in reality it often does not, as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy. Pierre Berger also analyses Blake's early mythological poems such as ''Ahania'' as declaring marriage laws to be a consequence of the fallenness of humanity, as these are born from pride and jealousy.

Some scholars have noted both that Blake's views on “free love” are both qualified and may have undergone shifts and modifications in his late years. Some poems from this period warn of dangers of predatory sexuality such as ''The Sick Rose''. Magnus Ankarsjö notes that while the hero of ''Visions of the Daughters of Albion'' is a strong advocate of free love, by the end of the poem she has become more circumspect as her awareness of the dark side of sexuality has grown, crying "Can this be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water?" Ankarsjö also notes that a major inspiration to Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, similarly developed more circumspect views of sexual freedom late in life. In light of Blake's aforementioned sense of human 'fallenness' Ankarsjö thinks Blake does ''not'' fully approve of sensual indulgence merely in defiance of law as exemplified by the female character of Leutha, since in the fallen world of experience all love is enchained. Ankarsjö records Blake as having supported a commune with some sharing of partners, though David Worrall has recently read ''The Book of Thel'' as a rejection of the proposal to take concubines espoused by some members of the Swedenborgian church.

Blake's later writings show a renewed interest in Christianity, and although he radically reinterprets Christian morality in a way that embraces sensual pleasure, there is little of the emphasis on sexual libertarianism found in several of his early poems, and there is advocacy of "self-denial", though such abnegation must be inspired by love rather than through authoritarian compulsion. Berger (moreso than Swinburne) is especially sensitive to a shift in sensibility between the early Blake and the later Blake. Berger believes the young Blake placed too much emphasis on following impulses, and that the older Blake had a better formed ideal of a true love that sacrifices self. Some celebration of mystical sensuality remains in the late poems (most notably in Blake's denial of the virginity of Jesus's mother). However, the late poems also place a greater emphasis on forgiveness, redemption, and emotional authenticity as a foundation for relationships.

Religious views

Although Blake's attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of religion ''per se''. His view of orthodoxy is evident in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'', a series of texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy. Therein, Blake lists several ''Proverbs of Hell'', among which are the following:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

As the chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. (8.21, 9.55, E36)

In ''The Everlasting Gospel'', Blake does not present Jesus as a philosopher or traditional messianic figure but as a supremely creative being, above dogma, logic and even morality:

If he had been Antichrist Creeping Jesus, He'd have done anything to please us: Gone sneaking into Synagogues And not us'd the Elders & Priests like Dogs, But humble as a Lamb or Ass, Obey'd himself to Caiaphas. God wants not Man to Humble himself (55–61, E519-20)

Jesus, for Blake, symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: "All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus." (''Descriptive Catalogue'', Plate 39, E543)

Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake describes a number of characters, including 'Urizen', 'Enitharmon', 'Bromion' and 'Luvah'. This mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology, and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel.

One of Blake's strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In ''A Vision of the Last Judgement'', Blake says that:

One may also note his words concerning religion in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'':

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. :1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. :2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul. :3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True :1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. :2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. :3. Energy is Eternal Delight. (Plate 4, E34)

Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a body distinct from the soul that must submit to the rule of the soul, but sees the body as an extension of the soul, derived from the 'discernment' of the senses. Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul. Elsewhere, he describes Satan as the 'state of error', and as beyond salvation.

Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly sexual repression: "Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." (7.4–5, E35) He saw the concept of 'sin' as a trap to bind men’s desires (the briars of ''Garden of Love''), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:

Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs & flaming hair But Desire Gratified Plants fruits & beauty there. (E474)

He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: "He is the only God ... and so am I, and so are you." A telling phrase in ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' is "men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast". This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and social equality in society and between the sexes.

Enlightenment philosophy

Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Due to his visionary religious beliefs, Blake opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in an excerpt from Blake's ''Jerusalem'':

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace. (15.14–20, E159)

Blake also believed that the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which depict the naturalistic fall of light upon objects, were products entirely of the "vegetative eye", and he saw Locke and Newton as "the true progenitors of Sir Joshua Reynolds' aesthetic". The popular taste in the England of that time for such paintings was satisfied with mezzotints, prints produced by a process that created an image from thousands of tiny dots upon the page. Blake saw an analogy between this and Newton's particle theory of light. Accordingly, Blake never used the technique, opting rather to develop a method of engraving purely in fluid line, insisting that:

Despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles, Blake thus arrived at a linear aesthetic that was in many ways more similar to the Neoclassical engravings of John Flaxman than to the works of the Romantics, with whom he is often classified.

Therefore Blake has also been viewed as an enlightenment poet and artist, in the sense that he was in accord with that movement's rejection of received ideas, systems, authorities and traditions. On the other hand, he was critical of what he perceived as the elevation of reason to the status of an oppressive authority. In his criticism of reason, law and uniformity Blake has been taken to be opposed to the enlightenment, but it has also been argued that, in a dialectical sense, he used the enlightenment spirit of rejection of external authority to criticise narrow conceptions of the enlightenment.

Assessment

Creative mindset

Northrop Frye, commenting on Blake's consistency in strongly held views, notes that Blake "himself says that his notes on [Joshua] Reynolds, written at fifty, are 'exactly Similar' to those on Locke and Bacon, written when he was 'very Young'. Even phrases and lines of verse will reappear as much as forty years later. Consistency in maintaining what he believed to be true was itself one of his leading principles ... Consistency, then, foolish or otherwise, is one of Blake's chief preoccupations, just as 'self-contradiction' is always one of his most contemptuous comments".

Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)". In one poem, narrated by a black child, white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds, which exist only until one learns "to bear the beams of love":

When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me. (23-8, E9)

Blake retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, and social and political statements are often present in his mystical symbolism. His views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evident in ''Songs of Experience'' (1794), in which he distinguishes between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God whom he saw as a positive influence.

Visions

From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first of these visions may have occurred as early as the age of four when, according to one anecdote, the young artist "saw God" when God "put his head to the window", causing Blake to break into screaming. At the age of eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and reported this vision, and he only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber. On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels. In a letter of condolence to William Hayley, dated 6 May 1800, four days after the death of Hayley's son, Blake writes:

In a letter to John Flaxman, dated 21 September 1800, Blake writes:

In a letter to Thomas Butts, dated 25 April 1803, Blake writes:

In ''A Vision of the Last Judgement'' Blake writes:

Aware of Blake's visions, William Wordsworth commented, "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." In a more deferential vein, writing in his ''A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature'', John William Cousins wrote that Blake was "a truly pious and loving soul, neglected and misunderstood by the world, but appreciated by an elect few", who "led a cheerful and contented life of poverty illumined by visions and celestial inspirations."

Bibliography

Illuminated books

c.1788:'' All Religions are One''

*''There is No Natural Religion''

1789: ''Songs of Innocence''

* ''The Book of Thel''

1790–1793: ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''

1793–1795: ''Continental prophecies''

1793: ''Visions of the Daughters of Albion''

* ''America a Prophecy''

1794: ''Europe a Prophecy''

*''The First Book of Urizen''

* ''Songs of Experience''

1795: ''The Book of Los''

* ''The Song of Los''

* ''The Book of Ahania''

c.1804–c.1811: ''Milton a Poem''

1804–1820: ''Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion''

Non-illuminated

1783: ''Poetical Sketches''

1784-5: ''An Island in the Moon''

1789: ''Tiriel''

1791: ''The French Revolution''

1792: ''A Song of Liberty''

1797: ''The Four Zoas''

Illustrated by Blake

1791: Mary Wollstonecraft, ''Original Stories from Real Life''

1796: Gottfried August Bürger, ''Leonora'' (not engraved by him)

1797: Edward Young, ''Night Thoughts''

1805–1808: Robert Blair, ''The Grave''

1808: John Milton, ''Paradise Lost''

1819–1820: John Varley, ''Visionary Heads''

1821: R.J. Thornton, ''Virgil''

1823–1826: ''The Book of Job''

1824–1827: John Bunyan, ''The Pilgrim's Progress'' (Not finished)

1825–1827: Dante, ''The Divine Comedy'' (Blake died in 1827 with work on these illustrations still unfinished. Of the 102 watercolours, 7 had been selected for engraving)

On Blake

See also

Radical Christianity

References

External links

Tate's online resource on William Blake

Friends of William Blake

Blake Society

"William Blake and Visual Culture" from the ''ImageText'' journal

Connected Histories: British History Sources, 1500-1900 This JISC-funded web service provides federated searching of online historical resources for research. The web link provides access to primary sources which refer to William Blake.

Profiles

Profile at the Academy of American Poets

Profile at the Poetry Foundation

William Blake profile, video on BBC Poetry Season and BBC etching gallery

William Blake at University of Toronto Libraries

Archive

The G.E. Bentley Blake archive at the University of Toronto

The William Blake Archive.

William Blake archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Blake's notebook using the British Library

Settings of William Blake's poetry in the Choral Public Domain Library

Category:1757 births Category:1827 deaths Category:Artist authors Category:English vegetarians Category:English abolitionists Category:English anarchists Category:English feminists Category:English painters Category:English poets Category:English printmakers Category:English Swedenborgians Category:Christian mystics Category:Male feminists Category:Mythopoeic writers Category:People from Soho Category:Prophets Category:English romantic painters Category:Romantic poets Category:Writers who illustrated their own writing Category:Free love advocates Category:English Dissenters Category:English watercolourists Category:Christian anarchists Category:Christian radicals

af:William Blake ar:ويليام بليك bn:উইলিয়াম ব্লেক zh-min-nan:William Blake be:Уільям Блэйк be-x-old:Ўільям Блэйк bg:Уилям Блейк bs:William Blake ca:William Blake cs:William Blake da:William Blake de:William Blake et:William Blake el:Ουίλλιαμ Μπλέηκ es:William Blake eo:William Blake eu:William Blake fa:ویلیام بلیک fr:William Blake fy:William Blake gd:William Blake gl:William Blake ko:윌리엄 블레이크 hy:Ուիլյամ Բլեյք hi:विलियम ब्लेक hr:William Blake id:William Blake ia:William Blake is:William Blake it:William Blake he:ויליאם בלייק kn:ವಿಲಿಯಂ ಬ್ಲೇಕ್‌ ka:უილიამ ბლეიკი ku:William Blake la:Gulielmus Blake lv:Viljams Bleiks lt:William Blake hu:William Blake mk:Вилијам Блејк ml:വില്യം ബ്ലെയ്ക്ക് xmf:უილიამ ბლეიქი ms:William Blake nl:William Blake ja:ウィリアム・ブレイク no:William Blake nn:William Blake uz:William Blake pl:William Blake pt:William Blake ro:William Blake ru:Блейк, Уильям sc:William Blake si:විලියම් බ්ලේක් simple:William Blake sk:William Blake sl:William Blake sr:Вилијам Блејк sh:William Blake fi:William Blake sv:William Blake ta:வில்லியம் பிளேக் th:วิลเลียม เบลก tr:William Blake uk:Вільям Блейк vi:William Blake war:William Blake diq:William Blake zh:威廉·布莱克

Birth date	27 October 1914
Birth place	Uplands, Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales
Death date	November 09, 1953
Death place	New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Poet and writer
Movement	Modernism
Influences	Arthur Rimbaud, D. H. Lawrence, Welsh Mythology, James Joyce, John Donne
Influenced	John Lennon, Bob Dylan, James K. Baxter
Spouse	Caitlin Macnamara (m. 1937–1953, his death)
Children	Llewellyn Edouard Thomas (1939–2000)Aeronwy Bryn Thomas (1943–2009)Colm Garan Hart Thomas (b. 1949) }}

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" ''Under Milk Wood'' and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".

Life and career

Early life

Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city. His father, David John Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. David was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.

Dylan is pronounced ˈdəlan in Welsh, and in the early part of his career some announcers introduced him using this pronunciation. However, Thomas himself favoured the anglicised pronunciation . A review of a biography by Andrew Lycett (2004) notes: "Florence, the boy’s mother, had her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the family used, is “Dullan,” and she worried that other children would tease him by calling him “dull one.” Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the way he himself pronounced it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him in honour of his great-uncle, Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.

His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work, notably many short stories, radio essays, and the poem ''Fern Hill''. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. He described his experience there in ''Quite Early One Morning'':

Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.

In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School, in the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the ''South Wales Daily Post'', only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these first years. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few more years. Thomas spent his time visiting the cinema in the Uplands, walking along Swansea Bay, visiting a theatre where he used to perform, and frequenting Swansea's pubs. He especially patronised those in the Mumbles area such the Antelope Hotel and the Mermaid Hotel. A short walk from the local newspaper where he worked was the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, central Swansea. At the café he met with various artist contemporaries, such as his good friend the poet Vernon Watkins. These writers, musicians and artists became known as 'The Kardomah Gang'. In 1932, Thomas embarked on what would be one of his various visits to London.

In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that suffered badly; the rows of shops, including the 'Kardomah Café', were destroyed. Thomas later wrote about this in his radio play ''Return Journey Home'', in which he describes the café as being "razed to the snow". ''Return Journey Home'' was first broadcast on 15 June 1947, having been written soon after the bombing raids. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". The Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland Street, not far from the original location.

Career and family

It is often commented that Thomas was indulged like a child and he was, in fact, still a teenager when he published many of the poems he would become famous for: “And death shall have no dominion" “Before I Knocked” and “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion", appeared in the ''New English Weekly'' in May 1933 and further work appeared in ''The Listener'' in 1934 catching the attention of two of the most senior poets of the day T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. His highly acclaimed first poetry volume, ''18 Poems'', was published on 18 December 1934, and went on to win a contest run by ''The Sunday Referee'', netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, which did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement would later be used by a number of other new authors, including Philip Larkin.

His passionate musical lyricism caused a sensation in these years of desiccated Modernism; the critic Desmond Hawkins said it was “the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years”. In all, he wrote half of his poems while living at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive before he moved to London. It was also the time that Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.

In the spring of 1936, Dylan Thomas met dancer Caitlin Macnamara in the Wheatsheaf pub, in the Fitzrovia area of London's West End. They were introduced by Augustus John, who was Macnamara's lover at the time (there were rumours that she continued her relationship with John after she married Thomas). A drunken Thomas proposed to Macnamara on the spot, and the two began a courtship. On 11 July 1937, Thomas married Macnamara in a register office in Penzance, Cornwall. In 1938, the couple rented a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, West Wales. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939 (d. 2000). Their daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, was born on 3 March 1943 (d. 2009). A second son, Colm Garan Hart, was born on 24 July 1949.

Wartime and after

At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was designated C3, which meant that although he could, in theory, be called up for service he would be in one of the last groups to be so. He was saddened to see his friends enter active service leaving him behind and drank whilst struggling to support his family. He lived on tiny fees from writing and reviewing and borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances, writing begging letters to random literary figures in hope of support, envisaging this as a plan of long term regular income. He wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of Information asking for employment but after a rebuff eventually ended up working for Strand Films. Strand produced films for the Ministry of Information and Thomas scripted at least five in 1942 with titles such as ''This Is Colour'' (about dye), ''New Towns For Old'', ''These Are The Men'' and ''Our Country'' (a sentimental tour of Britain). He actively sought to build a reputation as a raconteur and outrageous writer, heavy drinker and wit.

The publication of ''Deaths and Entrances'' in 1946 was a major turning point for Thomas. Poet and critic W. J. Turner commented in ''The Spectator'' "This book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet". Thomas was well known for being a versatile and dynamic speaker, best known for his poetry readings. He made over 200 broadcasts for the BBC.

Often considered his greatest single work, ''Under Milk Wood'', a radio play featuring the characters of Llareggub, is set in a fictional Welsh fishing village ('Llareggub' is 'Bugger All' backwards, implying that there is absolutely nothing to do there). The BBC credited their producer Stella Hillier with ensuring the play actually materialised. Assigned "some of the more wayward characters who were then writing for the BBC", she dragged the notoriously unreliable Thomas out of the pub and back to her office to finish the work. The play took several years to write, the first half mostly in South Leigh, Oxford, in 1948, whilst the second half was mostly written in America in May 1953. Fewer than 300 lines were written in Laugharne, according to one account, which also explains the influence of New Quay on the play.

New York

John Malcolm Brinnin invited Thomas to New York and in 1950 embarked on a lucrative three month tour of arts centres and campuses in the States. He toured there again in 1952, this time with Caitlin, who discovered that he had been unfaithful on his 1950 trip. They both drank heavily, as if in competition, Thomas's health beginning to suffer with gout and lung problems. Thomas performed a 'work in progress' version of ''Under Milk Wood'' solo for the first time on 3 May at Harvard during his early 1953 US tour, and then with a cast at the Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May. He worked on the play further in Wales, where in its completed form it premiered the Lyric Theatre, Carmarthen, Wales on 8 October 1953, just 12 miles away from Laugharne. It was said Thomas gave a 'supreme virtuoso performance'. He then travelled to London and on the 19 October he flew to America. He died in New York on 5 November 1953 before the BBC could record the play. Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954 and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film.

Thomas's last collection ''Collected Poems, 1934–1952'', published when he was 38, won the Foyle poetry prize. He wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night", a villanelle, to his dying father, who passed away in 1952, one of the poet's last poems.

Death

Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953, to take part in a performance of ''Under Milk Wood'' at the city's prestigious Poetry Centre. He was already ill and had a history of blackouts and heart problems, using an inhaler in New York to help his breathing. Thomas had liked to boast of his addiction to drinking, saying "An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do." He "liked the taste of whisky" and had a powerful reputation for his drinking. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled how intoxicating a performer he was and how the tension would build before a performance: “Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting possibilities.” His wife Caitlin said in her embittered memoir “Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it.” Thomas “exhibited the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars,” however the amount he is supposed to have drunk in his lifetime and in New York before his death, may well have been exaggerated as Thomas became mythologised.

On the evening of 27 October 1953, Thomas's 39th birthday, the poet attended a party in his honour but felt so unwell that he returned to his hotel. On 28 October 1953, he took part in ''Poetry And The Film'', a recorded symposium at Cinema 16, which included panellists Amos Vogel, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, and Willard Maas. The director of the Poetry Centre, John Brinnin, was also Thomas's tour agent. Brinnin didn't travel to New York, remaining at home in Boston and handed responsibility to his assistant, Liz Reitell. Reitell met Thomas at Idlewild Airport (now JFK airport) and he told her that he had had a terrible week, had missed her terribly and wanted to go to bed with her. Despite Reitell's previous misgivings about their relationship they spent the rest of the day and night together at the Chelsea Hotel. The next day she invited him to her apartment but he declined, saying that he was not feeling well and retired to his bed for the rest of the afternoon. After spending the night at the hotel with Thomas, Reitell went back to her own apartment for a change of clothes. At breakfast Herb Hannum noticed how sick Thomas looked and suggested a visit to a Dr. Feltenstein before the performance of ''Under Milk Wood'' that evening. The doctor went to work with his needle, and Thomas made it through the two performances of ''Under Milk Wood'', but collapsed straight afterwards. Reitell would later describe Feltenstein as a wild doctor who believed injections could cure anything.

A turning point came on 2 November. Air pollution in New York had risen significantly and exacerbated chest illnesses, such as Thomas had. By the end of the month, over two hundred New Yorkers had died from the smog. On 3 November Thomas spent most of that day in bed drinking. He went out in the evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel, he went out again for a drink at 2am. After drinking at the White Horse Tavern, a pub he'd found through Scottish poet Ruthven Todd, Thomas returned to the Hotel Chelsea, declaring, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record!" The barman and the owner of the pub who served Thomas at the time later commented that Thomas couldn't have imbibed more than half that amount. Thomas had an appointment to visit a clam house in New Jersey on 4 November. When phoned at the Chelsea that morning, he said that he was feeling awful and asked to take a rain-check. Later, he did go drinking with Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick again, returned to the hotel. Dr. Feltenstein came to see him three times that day, on the third call prescribing morphine, which seriously affected Thomas's breathing. At midnight on 5 November, his breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue. Reitell unsuccessfully tried to get hold of Feltenstein.

Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at nearby St Vincent's hospital. The medical notes state that he arrived in a coma at 1.58am, and that the "impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response". The duty doctors found bronchitis in all parts of his bronchial tree, both left and right sides. An X-ray showed pneumonia, and a raised white cell count confirmed the presence of an infection. Caitlin in Laugharne was sent a telegram on 5 November, notifying her that Dylan was in hospital. She flew to America the following day and was taken, with a police escort, to the hospital. Her alleged first words were "Is the bloody man dead yet?" The pneumonia worsened and Thomas died, whilst in coma, at noon on 9 November.

Aftermath

The first rumours to circulate were of a brain haemorrhage, followed by reports that he had been mugged and soon stories began to fly that he had drunk himself to death. Later, there were speculations about drugs and diabetes. At the post-mortem, the pathologist found that the immediate cause of death was swelling of the brain, caused by the pneumonia reducing the supply of oxygen. Despite his heavy drinking his liver showed little sign of cirrhosis.

Following his death, his body was brought back to Wales for his burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne on 25 November. One of the last people to stay at his graveside after the funeral was his mother, Florence. Thomas's obituary was written by his long-time friend and Welsh poet Vernon Watkins. His widow, Caitlin, died in 1994 and was buried alongside him. Thomas's father 'DJ' died on 16 December 1952 and his mother Florence died in August 1958. Thomas's elder son, Llewelyn, died in 2000. His only daughter, Aeronwy, died in 2009.

Caitlin Thomas's two searing autobiographies, ''Caitlin Thomas - Leftover Life to Kill'' (1957) and ''Double Drink Story: My life with Dylan'' (1997, published posthumously), both describe the highly destructive effect of alcoholism to the poet and to their relationship. "But ours was a drink story, not a love story, just like millions of others. Our one and only true love was drink", she writes. "The bar was our altar". His biographer Lycett ascribed the demise of Dylan's health to an alcoholic co-dependent relationship with his wife Caitlin, who deeply resented his affairs.

Poetry

Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle ''Do not go gentle into that good night''. His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud. Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in poems such as ''Fern Hill'', ''In Country Sleep'', ''Ballad of the Long-legged Bait'' or ''In the White Giant's Thigh'' from ''Under Milkwood'': :::Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house :::and heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost, :::the scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse :::of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were ''Mother Goose'' rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

Memorials

A statue of Thomas is in the city's maritime quarter. The Dylan Thomas Theatre Swansea Little Theatre and the Dylan Thomas Centre, formerly the town's Guildhall, are also found in Swansea. The latter is now a literature centre, where exhibitions and lectures are held, and is the setting for an annual Dylan Thomas Festival. Another monument to Thomas stands in Cwmdonkin Park, one of his favourite childhood haunts, close to his birthplace at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. The memorial is a small rock in a closed-off garden, set within the park. The rock is inscribed with the closing lines from "Fern Hill": :::Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means :::Time held me green and dying :::Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Thomas's home in Laugharne, the Boat House, has been made a memorial. Several of the pubs in Swansea also have associations with the poet. One of Swansea's oldest pubs, 'The No Sign Bar' (since renamed 'The No Sign Wine Bar') was a regular haunt of Thomas's and is mentioned in his story "The Followers". A class 153 diesel multiple unit was named 'Dylan Thomas 1914–1953' and in 2004 the Dylan Thomas Prize was created in honour of the poet, awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30. Following this, in 2005, the Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award was established. The prize is administered by the Dylan Thomas Centre, and is awarded at the annual Swansea Bay Film Festival. In 1982 a plaque was unveiled in his honour in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Selected works

Poetry collections

1934 ''18 Poems''

1936 ''Twenty-Five Poems''

1939 ''The Map of Love''

1943 ''New Poems''

1946 ''Deaths and Entrances''

1950 ''Twenty-Six Poems''

1952 ''In Country Sleep''

1952 ''Collected Poems, 1934–1952''

Collected prose

1940 ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog'', Dent

1946 ''Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas'', New Directions

1953 ''Adventures In The Skin Trade And Other Stories'' (''Adventures In The Skin Trade'', an unfinished novel). New Directions

1954 ''Quite Early One Morning'' (Planned by Thomas, posthumously published). New Directions

1955 ''A Child's Christmas in Wales'', New Directions

1955 ''A Prospect of the Sea and other stories and prose writings'', Dent

1957 ''Letters to Vernon Watkins'', Dent

1965 ''Rebecca's Daughters'', Triton

1969 '' The year of love''.

Drama

1954 ''Under Milk Wood'' (Radio play)

1953 ''The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts''

1964 ''The Beach of Falesa'' (Screenplay)

Further reading: collections

1966 ''Dylan Thomas: a Collection of Critical Essays''. Edited by Charles B. Cox

1971 ''The Poems of Dylan Thomas'' W. W. Norton & Co

1978 ''A Child's Christmas in Wales'' illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1996: published as Dolphin Paperback from Orion Children's Books

1982 ''Selected Works'', Guild Publishing, London

1984 ''The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas'', New Directions Publishing

1986 ''Collected Letters''. Edited by Paul Ferris. MacMillan

1992 ''On the Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts'', Ed. Ralph Maud New Directions Publishing

1994 ''Eight Stories'', W. W. Norton & Co

1995 ''Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays'', Ed. John Ackerman. Applause Books

1997 ''Fern Hill: An Illustrated edition of the Dylan Thomas poem.'' Red Deer College Press, Canada

2000 ''Collected Poems 1934-1953'', London: Phoenix

2000 ''Selected Poems'' London: Phoenix

Critical studies

Brinnin, J M ''Dylan Thomas in America: an intimate journal'', 1957

Gilbar & Stewart ''Literary Santa Barbara'' 1998, pp. 248–252

Lycett, Andrew. ''Dylan Thomas: A new life'', 2003

Thomas, Caitlin ''Leftover Life to Kill'', 1957

Thomas, David N. ''Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?'' David N. Thomas, Seren 2008

Thomas, David N. ''Dylan Remembered, Volume 2: 1935-1953'', Seren 2004

Thomas, David N. ''Dylan Remembered, Volume 1: 1913- 1934'', Seren 2003

Thomas, David N. ''The Dylan Thomas Murders'', Seren 2002

Thomas, David N. ''Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow'', Seren 2000

Discography

''Dylan Thomas: Volume I — A Child's Christmas in Wales and Five Poems'' (Caedmon TC 1002–1952)

''Under Milk Wood'' (Caedmon TC 2005–1953)

''Dylan Thomas: Volume II — Selections from the Writings of Dylan Thomas'' (Caedmon TC 1018–1954)

''Dylan Thomas: Volume III — Selections from the Writings of Dylan Thomas'' (Caedmon TC 1043)

''Dylan Thomas: Volume IV — Selections from the Writings of Dylan Thomas'' (Caedmon TC 1061)

''Dylan Thomas: Quite early one morning and other memories'' (Caedmon TC 1132–1960)

''Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood and other plays'' (Naxos Audiobooks NA288712 – 2008) (originally BBC – 1954)

Posthumous film adaptations

1972 ''Under Milk Wood'', 1972, starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter O'Toole

1987 ''A Child's Christmas in Wales''. Directed by Don McBrearty.

1992 ''Rebecca's Daughters'' starring Peter O'Toole and Joely Richardson

2007 ''Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology'' (DDHE/IWM D23702 – 2006)

2009 ''Nadolig Plentyn yng Nghymru/A Child's Christmas in Wales'', 2009 BAFTA Best Short Film, animation, soundtrack in Welsh and English, Director: Dave Unwin. Extras include filmed comments from Aeronwy Thomas. 5-016886-088457.

Media depictions

1964: ''Dylan'', a Broadway play by Sidney Michaels, starring Alec Guinness as Dylan Thomas.

1978: ''Dylan'', film of Thomas's final visit to America; directed by Richard Lewis.

1990–91: ''Dylan Thomas: Return Journey'', a one-man stage show featuring Bob Kingdom as Thomas and directed by Anthony Hopkins. 2008: ''The Edge of Love'' starring Matthew Rhys as the poet, directed by John Maybury, written by Sharman Macdonald

References

Bibliography

External links

Works by Dylan Thomas (public domain in Canada). Accessed 11 September 2010

The Life and Work of Dylan Thomas (archive). Accessed 11 September 2010

The Dylan Thomas museum at Laugharne. Accessed 11 September 2010

BBC Biography. Accessed 11 September 2010

Audio files: Anthology Film Archives. Including Dylan Thomas (drunk). Symposium at Cinema 16 1953-10-28. Accessed 11 September 2010

Dylan Thomas on Poets.org Biography, poems, audio clips, and essays. Accessed 11 September 2010

Dylan Thomas Official Family Web Site, Swansea. Accessed 11 September 2010

BBC Wales' Dylan Thomas site. Accessed 11 September 2010

BBC Wales biography of Caitlin. Accessed 11 September 2010

Dylan Thomas's archive at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Accessed 11 September 2010

The death of Dylan Thomas from BBC Cymru Wales. Accessed 8 November 2011

Category:1914 births Category:1953 deaths Category:Alcohol-related deaths in New York Category:Anglo-Welsh poets Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:Formalist poets Category:Infectious disease deaths in New York Category:People educated at Bishop Gore School Category:People from Swansea Category:People self-identifying as alcoholics Category:Prix Italia Award winners Category:Welsh novelists Category:Welsh poets Category:Welsh short story writers Category:Welsh writers

be:Дылан Томас be-x-old:Дылан Томас bg:Дилън Томас bs:Dylan Thomas ca:Dylan Thomas cs:Dylan Thomas cy:Dylan Thomas da:Dylan Thomas de:Dylan Thomas et:Dylan Thomas es:Dylan Thomas eu:Dylan Thomas fa:دیلان تامس fr:Dylan Thomas fy:Dylan Thomas ga:Dylan Thomas gl:Dylan Thomas ko:딜런 토마스 hr:Dylan Thomas id:Dylan Thomas it:Dylan Thomas he:דילן תומאס hu:Dylan Thomas mr:डिलन थॉमस nl:Dylan Thomas nds-nl:Dylan Thomas ja:ディラン・トマス no:Dylan Thomas pl:Dylan Thomas pt:Dylan Thomas ru:Томас, Дилан simple:Dylan Thomas fi:Dylan Thomas sv:Dylan Thomas tr:Dylan Thomas yo:Dylan Thomas zh:狄兰·托马斯