Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
Imaginary depiction of Ovid with laurel wreath (from an engraving)
Born	20 March 43 BC Sulmo, Roman Republic (modern Sulmona, Italy)
Died	AD 17 or 18 (age 58–60) Tomis, Scythia Minor, Roman Empire (modern Constanţa, Romania)
Occupation	Poet
Genres	Elegy, drama, epic
Influences Catullus, Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Latro, Propertius
Influenced Apuleius, Gualterus Anglicus, Renaissance painters, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chapman, Percy Shelley, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Bob Dylan

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, and of the Metamorphoses, a mythological hexameter poem. He is also well known for the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written in exile on the Black Sea. Ovid was also the author of several smaller pieces, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the long curse-poem Ibis. He also authored a lost tragedy, Medea. He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists.^[1] His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature and remains as one of the most important sources of classical mythology.^[2]

Life[link]

Ovid talks more about his own life than most other Roman poets. Information about his biography is drawn primarily from his poetry, especially Tristia 4.10, which gives a long autobiographical account of his life. Other sources include Seneca and Quintilian.

Birth, early life and marriage[link]

Ovid was born in Sulmo (Sulmona), in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, on March 20, 43 BC. That was a significant year in Roman politics.^[a] He was educated in Rome in rhetoric under the teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro with his brother who excelled at oratory.^[3] His father wished him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to the emotional, not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily.^[4] He held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales^[5] and as one of the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis,^[6] but resigned to pursue poetry probably around 29–25 BC, a decision of which his father apparently disapproved.^[7] His first recitation has been dated to around 25 BC, when Ovid was eighteen.^[8] He was part of the circle centered upon the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, but seems to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. In Trist. 4.10.41–54, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Propertius, Horace, and Bassus (he only barely met Virgil and Tibullus, a fellow member of Messalla's circle whose elegies he admired greatly). Ovid was very popular at the time of his early works, but was later exiled by Augustus in AD 8. He married three times and divorced twice by the time he was thirty years old. However, he only had one daughter who eventually bore him grandchildren.^[9] His last wife was connected in some way to the influential gens Fabia and would help him during his exile in Tomis.^[10]

Literary success[link]

View of the Statue of Ovid in Piazza XX Settembre, Sulmona, Italy.

The first 25 years of Ovid's literary career were spent primarily writing poetry in elegiac meter with erotic themes.^[11] The chronology of these early works is not secure; tentative dates, however, have been established by scholars. His earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, which may have been published in 19 BC, although the date is uncertain as it depends on a notice in Am.2.18.19–26, which seems to describe the collection as an early published work. The authenticity of various of these poems has been challenged but this first edition probably contained the first 14 poems of the collection. The first five-book collection of the Amores, a series of erotic poems addressed to a lover, Corinna, is thought to have been published in 16–15 BC; the surviving, extant version, redacted to three books according to an epigram prefixed to the first book, is thought to have been published c. 8–3 BC. Between the publications of the two editions of the Amores can be dated the premiere of his tragedy Medea which was admired in antiquity but is now no longer extant. Ovid's next poem, the Medicamina Faciei, a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments preceded the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, a parody of didactic poetry and a three-book manual about seduction and intrigue,^[12] which has been dated to 2 AD. Ovid may identify this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, which was one cause of his banishment. The Ars Amatoria was followed by the Remedia Amoris in the same year. This corpus of elegiac, erotic poetry earned Ovid a place among the chief Roman elegists Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, of which he saw himself as the fourth member.^[13]

By 8 AD, he had completed his most ambitious work, the Metamorphoses, a hexameter epic poem in 15 books which encyclopedically catalogues transformations in Greek and Roman mythology from the emergence of the cosmos to the deification of Julius Caesar. The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies — trees, rocks, animals, flowers, constellations et cetera. At the same time, he was working on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets which took the Roman festivals calendar and astronomy as its theme. The composition of this poem was interrupted by Ovid's exile,^[b] and it is thought that Ovid abandoned work on the piece in Tomis. It is likely in this period, if they are indeed by Ovid, that the double letters (16–21) in the Heroides were composed.

Exile to Tomis[link]

In 8 AD, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge,^[14] an event which would shape all of his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error — "a poem and a mistake",^[15] claiming that his crime was worse than murder,^[16] more harmful than poetry.^[17][18] The Emperor's grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia's husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus, a conspiracy about which Ovid might have known. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC, which promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population's birth rate, were fresh in the Roman mind. Ovid's writing in the Ars Amatoria concerned the serious crime of adultery, and he may have been banished for these works which appeared subversive to the emperor's moral legislation. However, because of the long distance of time between the publication of this work (1 BC) and the exile (8 AD), some authors suggest that Augustus used the poem as a mere justification for something more personal.^[19]

William Turner, Ovid Banished from Rome, 1838.

In exile, Ovid wrote two poetry collections titled Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, illustrating his sadness and desolation. Being far from Rome, he had no access to libraries, and thus might have been forced to abandon the Fasti poem about the Roman calendar, of which only the first six books exist — January through June. The five books of the elegiac Tristia, a series of poems expressing the poet's despair in exile and advocating his return to Rome, are dated to 9–12 AD. The Ibis, an elegiac curse poem attacking an adversary at home may also be dated to this period. The Epistulae ex Ponto, a series of letters to friends in Rome asking them to effect his return, are thought to be his last compositions, with the first three books published in 13 AD and the fourth book between 14 and 16 AD. The exile poetry is particularly emotive and personal. In the Epistulae he claims friendship with the natives of Tomis (in the Tristia they are frightening barbarians) and to have written a poem in their language (Ex P. 4.13.19–20). And yet he pined for Rome and for his third wife, as many of the poems are to her. Some are also to the Emperor Augustus, yet others are to himself, to friends in Rome, and sometimes to the poems themselves, expressing loneliness and hope of recall from banishment or exile.^[20]

The obscure causes of Ovid's exile have given rise to endless explanations from scholars studying antiquity. In fact, the medieval texts that mention the exile offer no credible explanations as their statements seem incorrect interpretations drawn from the works of Ovid.^[21] Ovid himself wrote many references to his offense giving obscure or contradictory clues.^[22] In 1923, scholar J. J. Hartmann proposed a theory that is little considered among scholars of Latin civilization today — that Ovid never left Rome to the exile and that all of his exile works are the result of his fertile imagination. This theory was supported and rejected in the 1930s, especially by Dutch authors.^[23] In 1985 a new research paper by Fitton Brown advanced new arguments in support of the theory;^[24] the article was followed by a series of supports and refutations in the short space of five years.^[25] Among the reasons argued by Brown is: that Ovid's exile is only informed by his own work, except in "dubious" passages by Pliny the Elder,^[26] Statius,^[27] but no other author until the 4th century;^[28] that the author of Heroides was able to separate the poetic "I" of his own and real life; that information on the geography of Tomis were already known by Virgil, Herodotus and by Ovid himself in his Metamorphoses.^[c][29] Orthodox scholars, however, are opposed to these hypotheses.^[30] One of the main arguments of these scholars is that Ovid wouldn't let his Fasti remain unfinished, mainly because this poem meant his consecration as an imperial poet.^[31]

Death[link]

View of Ovid's statue in Tomis/Constanța

Ovid died at Tomis in AD 17. It is thought that the Fasti, which he spent time revising, were published posthumously. He was allegedly buried a few kilometers away in a nearby town. In 1930 that town was renamed Ovidiu in his honor. As Ovid spent the last years of his life and literary work in what is now Romania, Romanian nationalists have adopted him as "The First Romanian Poet" and placed him in the pantheon of Romanian national heroes^{[citation needed]}. Ovidiu is a common male first name in Romania. Also, a statue commemorates him in the Romanian city of Tomis (contemporary Constanța). The statue's Latin inscription reads (Tristia 3.3.73–76):

Hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum

Ingenio perii, Naso poeta, meo.

At tibi qui transis, ne sit grave, quisquis amasti,

Dicere: Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.

Here I lie, who played with tender loves,

Naso the poet, killed by my own talent.

O passerby, if you've ever been in love, let it not be too much for you

to say: May the bones of Naso lie gently.

Works[link]

Fresco of Medea from Herculaneum.

[edit] Heroides ("The Heroines")

The Heroides ("Heroines") or Epistulae Heroidum are a collection of 21 poems in elegiac couplets. The Heroides take the form of letters addressed by famous mythological characters to their partners expressing their emotions at being separated from them, pleas for their return, and allusions to their future actions within their own mythology. The authenticity of the collection, partially or as a whole, has been questioned, although most scholars would consider the letters mentioned specifically in Ovid's description of the work at Am. 2.18.19–26 as safe from objection. The collection comprises a new type of generic composition without parallel in earlier literature.^[32] The first 14 letters are thought to comprise the first published collection and are written by the heroines Penelope, Phyllis, Briseis, Phaedra, Oenone, Hypsipyle, Dido, Hermione, Deianeira, Ariadne, Canace, Medea, Laodamia, and Hypermestra to their absent male lovers. Letter 15, from the historical Sappho to Phaon, seems spurious (although referred to in Am. 2.18) because of its length, its lack of integration in the mythological theme, and its absence from Medieval manuscripts.^[33] The final letters (16–21) are paired compositions comprising a letter to a lover and a reply. Paris and Helen, Hero and Leander, and Acontius and Cydippe are the addressees of the paired letters. These are considered a later addition to the corpus because they are never mentioned by Ovid and may or may not be spurious. The Heroides markedly reveal the influence of rhetorical declamation and may derive from Ovid's interest in rhetorical suasoriae, persuasive speeches, and ethopoeia, the practice of speaking in another character. They also play with generic conventions; most of the letters seem to refer to works in which these characters were significant, such as the Aeneid in the case of Dido and Catullus 64 for Ariadne and transfer characters from the genres of epic and tragedy to the elegiac genre of the Heroides.^[34] The letters have been admired for their deep psychological portrayals of mythical characters, their rhetoric, and their unique attitude to the classical tradition of mythology.

[edit] Amores ("The Loves")

Ovide and Corine, his lover from the Amores, painted by Agostino Carracci (1557 - 1602).

The Amores is a collection in three books of love poetry in elegiac meter, following the conventions of the elegiac genre developed by Tibullus and Propertius. The books describe the many aspects of love and focus on the poet's relationship with a mistress called Corinna. Within the various poems are several which describe events in the relationship, thus presenting the reader with some vignettes and a loose narrative. Book 1 contains 15 poems; the first poem tells of Ovid's intention to write epic poetry which is thwarted when Cupid steals a metrical foot from him, changing his work into love elegy. Poem 4 is didactic and describes principles which Ovid would develop in the Ars Amatoria. The fifth poem, describing a noon tryst, introduces Corinna by name. Poems 8 and 9 deal with Corinna selling her love for gifts, while 11 and 12 describe the poet's failed attempt to arrange a meeting. 14 discusses Corinna's disastrous experiment in dyeing her hair and 15 stresses the immortality of Ovid and love poets.

The second book has 19 pieces; the opening poem tells of Ovid's abandonment of a Gigantomachy in favor of elegy. 2 and 3 are entreaties to a guardian to let the poet see Corinna, poem 6 is a lament for Corinna's dead parrot, 7 and 8 deal with Ovid's affair with Corinna's servant and her discovery of it, and 11 and 12 try to prevent Corinna from going on vacation. 13 a prayer to Isis for Corinna's illness, 14 a poem against abortion, and 19 a warning to unwary husbands. Book 3 has 15 poems. The opening piece depicts personified Tragedy and Elegy fighting over Ovid. 2 describes a visit to the races, 3 and 8 focus on Corinna's interest in other men, 10 is a complaint to Ceres because of her festival that requires abstinence, 13 is a poem on a festival of Juno, and 9 a lament for Tibullus. In poem 11 Ovid decides not to love Corinna any longer and regrets the poems he has written about her. The final poem is Ovid's farewell to the erotic muse. Critics have seen the poems a highly self conscious and extremely playful specimens of the elegiac genre.^[35]

[edit] Medicamina Faciei Femineae ("Women's Facial Cosmetics")

About a hundred elegiac lines survive from this poem on beauty treatments for women's faces, which seems to parody serious didactic poetry. The poem says that women should concern themselves first with manners and then prescribes several compounds for facial treatments before breaking off. The style is not unlike the shorter Hellenistic didactic works of Nicander and Aratus.

[edit] Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love")

The Ars Amatoria is a didactic elegiac poem in three books which sets out to teach the arts of seduction and love. The first book is addressed to men and teaches them how to seduce women, the second, also to men, teaches one how to keep a lover. The third is addressed to women and teaches seduction techniques. The first book opens with an invocation to Venus in which Ovid establishes himself as a praeceptor amoris (1.17) a teacher of love. Ovid describes the places one can go to find a lover, like the theater, a triumph, which is thoroughly described, or arena, and ways to get the girl to take notice, including seducing her covertly at a banquet. Choosing the right time is significant as are getting into her associates' confidence. Ovid emphasizes care of the body for the lover. Mythological digressions include a piece on the Rape of the Sabine women, Pasiphae, and Ariadne. Book 2 invokes Apollo and begins with a telling of the story of Icarus. Ovid advises lovers to avoid giving too many gifts, keep up their appearance, hide affairs, complement her, and ingratiate themselves with slaves to stay on their lover's good side. The care of Venus for procreation is described as is Apollo's aid in keeping a lover; Ovid then digresses on the story of Vulcan's trap for Venus and Mars. The book ends with Ovid asking his "students" to spread his fame. Book 3, opens with a vindication of women's abilities and Ovid's resolution to arm women against his teaching in the first two books. Ovid gives women detailed instructions on appearance telling them to avoid too many adornments. He advises women to read elegiac poetry, learn to play games, sleep with people of different ages, flirt, and dissemble. Throughout the book, Ovid playfully interjects, criticizing himself for undoing all his didactic work to men and mythologically digresses on the story of Procris and Cephalus. The book ends with his wish that women will follow his advice and spread his fame saying Naso magister erat, Ovid was our teacher.

[edit] Remedia Amoris ("The Cure for Love")

This elegiac poem proposes a cure for the love which Ovid teaches in the Ars Amatoria and is primarily addressed to men. The poem criticizes suicide as a means for escaping love and, invoking Apollo, goes on to tell lovers not to procrastinate and be lazy in dealing with love. Lovers are taught to avoid their partners, not perform magic, see their lover unprepared, take other lovers, and never be jealous. Old letters should be burned and the lover's family avoided. The poem throughout presents Ovid as a doctor and utilizes medical imagery. Some have interpreted this poem as the close of Ovid's didactic cycle of love poetry and the end of his erotic elegiac project.^[36]

[edit] Metamorphoses ("Transformations")

Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys’s 1632 London edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished.

The Metamorphoses, Ovid's most ambitious and popular work, consists of a 15-book catalogue written in dactylic hexameter about the transformations in Greek and Roman mythology set within a loose mytho-historical framework. Each myth is set outdoors where the mortals are often vulnerable to external influences. Almost 250 different myths are mentioned. The poem stands in the tradition of mythological and aetiological catalogue poetry such as Hesiod's Catalogue of Women, Callimachus' Aetia, Nicander's Heteroeumena, and Parthenius^{[disambiguation needed ]}' Metamorphoses. The first book describes the formation of the world, the ages of man, the flood, the story of Daphne's rape by Apollo and Io's by Jupiter. The second book opens with Phaethon and continues describing the love of Jupiter with Callisto and Europa. The third book focuses on the mythology of Thebes with the stories of Cadmus, Actaeon, and Pentheus. The fourth book focuses on three lovers: Pyramus and Thisbe, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, and Perseus and Andromeda. The fifth book focuses on the song of the Muses, which describes the rape of Proserpina. The sixth book is a collection of stories about the rivalry between gods and mortals, beginning with Arachne and ending with Philomela. The seventh book focuses on Medea, as well as Cephalus and Procris. The eighth book focuses on Daedalus' flight, the Calydonian boar hunt, and the contrast between pious Baucis and Philemon and the wicked Erysichthon. The ninth book focuses on Heracles and the incestuous Byblis. The tenth book focuses on stories of doomed love, such as Orpheus, who sings about Hyacinthus, as well as Pygmalion, Myrrha, and Adonis. The eleventh book compares the marriage of Peleus and Thetis with the love of Ceyx and Alcyone. The twelfth book moves from myth to history describing the exploits of Achilles, the battle of the centaurs, and Iphigeneia. The thirteenth book discusses the contest over Achilles' arms, and Polyphemus. The fourteenth moves to Italy, describing the journey of Aeneas, Pomona and Vertumnus, and Romulus. The final book opens with a philosophical lecture by Pythagoras and the deification of Caesar. The end of the poem praises Augustus and expresses Ovid's belief that his poem has earned him immortality.

In analyzing the Metamorphoses, scholars have focused on Ovid's organization of his vast body of material. The ways that stories are linked by geography, themes, or contrasts creates interesting effects and constantly forces the reader to evaluate the connections. Ovid also varies his tone and material from different literary genres; G. B. Conte has called the poem a "a sort of gallery of these various literary genres."^[37] In this spirit, Ovid engages creatively with his predecessors, alluding creatively to the full spectrum of classical poetry. Ovid's use of Alexandrian epic, or elegiac couplets, shows his fusion of erotic and psychological style with traditional forms of epic.

[edit] Fasti ("The Festivals")

Six books in elegiacs survive of this second ambitious poem on which Ovid was working at the time he was exiled. The six books cover the first semester of the year, with each book dedicated to a different month of the Roman calendar (January to June). The project seems unprecedented in Roman literature. It seems that Ovid planned to cover the whole year, but was unable to finish because of his exile, although he did revise sections of the work at Tomis, and he claims at Trist. 2.549–52 that his work was interrupted after six books. Like the Metamorphoses, the Fasti was to be a long poem and emulated aetiological poetry by writers like Callimachus and, more recently, Propertius and his fourth book. The poem goes through the Roman calendar, explaining the origins and customs of important Roman festivals, digressing on mythical stories, and giving astronomical and agricultural information appropriate to the season. The poem was probably dedicated to Augustus initially, but perhaps the death of the emperor prompted Ovid to change the dedication to honor Germanicus. Ovid uses direct inquiry of gods and scholarly research to talk about the calendar and regularly calls himself a vates, a priest. He also seems to emphasize unsavory, popular traditions of the festivals, imbuing the poem with a popular, plebeian flavor, which some have interpreted as subversive to the Augustan moral legislation.^[38] While this poem has always been invaluable to students of Roman religion and culture for the wealth of antiquarian material it preserves, it recently has been seen as one of Ovid's finest literary works and a unique contribution to Roman elegiac poetry.

[edit] Ibis ("The Ibis")

The Ibis is an elegiac poem in 644 lines, in which Ovid uses a dazzling array of mythic stories to curse and attack an enemy who is harming him in exile. At the beginning of the poem, Ovid claims that his poetry up to that point had been harmless, but now he is going to use his abilities to hurt his enemy. He cites Callimachus' Ibis as his inspiration and calls all the gods to make his curse effective. Ovid uses mythical exempla to condemn his enemy in the afterlife, cites evil prodigies that attended his birth, and then in the next 300 lines wishes that the torments of mythological characters happen to his enemy. The poem ends with a prayer that the gods make his curse effective.

[edit] Tristia ("Sorrows")

The Tristia consist of five books of elegiac poetry composed by Ovid in exile in Tomis. Book 1 contains 11 poems; the first piece is an address by Ovid to his book about how it should act when it arrives in Rome. 3 describes his final night in Rome, 2 and 10 Ovid's voyage to Tomis, 8 the betrayal of a friend, and 5 and 6 the loyalty of his friends and wife. In the final poem Ovid apologizes for the quality and tone of his book, a sentiment echoed throughout the collection. Book 2 consists of one long poem in which Ovid defends himself and his poetry, uses precedents to justify his work, and begs the emperor for forgiveness. Book 3 in 14 poems focuses on Ovid's life in Tomis. The opening poem describes his book's arrival in Rome to find Ovid's works banned. Poems 10, 12, and 13 focus on the seasons spent in Tomis, 9 on the origins of the place, 2,3, and 11 his emotional distress and longing for home. The final poem is again an apology for his work. The fourth book has ten poems addressed mostly to friends. Poem 1 expresses his love of poetry and the solace it brings; 2 describes a triumph of Tiberius. Poems 3–5 are to friends, 7 a request for correspondence, and 10 an autobiography. The final book of the Tristia with 14 poems focuses on his wife and friends. Poems 4, 5, 11, and 14 are addressed to his wife, 2 and 3 are prayers to Augustus and Bacchus, 4 and 6 are to friends, 8 to an enemy. Poem 13 asks for letters, while 1 and 12 are apologies to his readers for the quality of his poetry.

A oil on paper laid down on wood of 1862 by Delacroix called Ovid among the Scythians.

[edit] Epistulae ex Ponto ("Letters from the Black Sea")

The Epistulae ex Ponto is a collection in four books of further poetry from exile. The Epistulae are each addressed to a different friend and focus more desperately than the Tristia on securing his recall from exile. The poems mainly deal with requests for friends to speak on his behalf to members of the imperial family, discussions of writing with friends, and descriptions of life in exile. The first book has ten pieces in which Ovid describes the state of his health (10), his hopes, memories, and yearning for Rome (3,6,8), and his needs in exile (3). Book 2 contains impassioned requests to Germanicus (1 and 5) and various friends to speak on his behalf at Rome while he describes his despair and life in exile. Book 3 has nine poems in which Ovid addresses his wife (1) and various friends. It includes a telling of the story of Iphigenia in Tauris (2), a poem against criticism (9), and a dream of Cupid (3). Book 4, the final work of Ovid, in 16 poems talks to friends and describes his life as an exile further. Poems 10 and 13 describe Winter and Spring at Tomis, poem 14 is half-hearted praise for Tomis, 7 describes its geography and climate, and 4 and 9 are congratulations on friends for their consulships and requests for help. Poem 12 is addressed to a Tuticanus, whose name, Ovid complains, does not fit into meter. The final poem is addressed to an enemy whom Ovid implores to leave him alone. The last elegiac couplet is translated: "Where’s the joy in stabbing your steel into my dead flesh?/ There’s no place left where I can be dealt fresh wounds."^[39]

Lost works[link]

One loss which Ovid himself informs us of is the first five-book edition of the Amores from which nothing has come down to us. The greatest loss is Ovid's only tragedy, Medea, from which only a few lines are preserved. Quintilian admired the work a great deal and considered it a prime example of Ovid's poetic talent.^[40] Lactantius quotes from a lost translation by Ovid of Aratus' Phaenomena, although the poem's ascription to Ovid is insecure because it is never mentioned in Ovid's other works.^[41] Even though it is unlikely, if the last six books of the Fasti ever existed, they constitute a great loss. Ovid also mentions some occasional poetry which does not survive.^[42] Also lost is the final portion of the Medicamina.

Spurious works[link]

[edit] Consolatio ad Liviam ("Consolation to Livia")

The Consolatio is a long elegiac poem of consolation to Augustus' wife Livia on the death of her son Drusus. The poem opens by advising Livia not to try and hide her sad emotions and contrasts Drusus' military virtue with his death. Drusus' funeral and the tributes of the imperial family are described as are his final moments and Livia's lament over the body, which is compared to birds. The laments of the city of Rome as it greets his funeral procession and the gods are mentioned, and Mars from his temple dissuades the Tiber river from quenching the pyre out of grief. Grief is expressed for his lost military honors, his wife, and his mother. The poet asks Livia to look for consolation in Tiberius. The poem ends with an address by Drusus to Livia assuring him of his fate in Elysium. Although this poem was connected to the Elegiae in Maecenatem, it is now thought that they are unconnected. The date of the piece is unknown, but a date in the reign of Tiberius has been suggested because of that emperor's prominence in the poem.^[43]

[edit] Halieutica ("On Fishing")

The Halieutica is a fragmentary didactic poem in 134 poorly preserved hexameter lines and is considered spurious. The poem begins by describing how every animal possesses the ability to protect itself and how fish use ars to help themselves. The ability of dogs and land creatures to protect themselves are described. The poem goes on to list the places which are best for fishing and which types of fish should be caught. Although Pliny the Elder mentions a Halieutica by Ovid, which was composed at Tomis near the end of Ovid's life, modern scholars believe Pliny was mistaken in his attribution and that the poem is not genuine.^[44]

[edit] Nux ("The Walnut Tree")

This short poem in 91 elegiac couplets is a monologue spoken by a walnut tree asking that boys not pelt her with stones to get her fruit. The tree contrasts the formerly fruitful golden age with the present barren time, in which its fruit is violently ripped off and its branches broken. The tree compares itself to several mythological characters, praises the peace the emperor provides, and prays to be destroyed rather than suffer. The poem is considered spurious because it incorporates allusions to Ovid's works in an uncharacteristic way, although the piece is thought to be contemporary or by a poet of the same period.^[45]

[edit] Somnium ("The Dream")

This poem, traditionally placed at Amores 3.5 is considered spurious. The poet describes a dream to an interpreter, saying that he sees while escaping from the heat of noon a white heifer near a bull; when the heifer is pecked by a crow, it leaves the bull for a meadow with other bulls. The interpreter interprets the dream as a love allegory; the bull represents the poet, the heifer a girl, and the crow an old woman. The old woman spurs the girl to leave her lover and find someone else. The poem is known to have circulated independently and its lack of engagement with Tibullan or Propertian elegy argue in favor of its spuriousness, however, the poem does seem to be datable to the early empire.^[46]

Style[link]

Ovid is traditionally considered the final significant love elegist in the evolution of the genre and one of the most versatile in his handling of the genre's conventions. Like the other canonical elegiac poets Ovid takes on a persona in his works that emphasizes subjectivity and personal emotion over traditional militaristic and public goals, a convention which has been linked by some scholars with the relative stability provided by the Augustan settlement.^[47][48] However, although Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius may have been inspired in part by personal experience (the validity of "biographical" readings of these poets' works is a serious point of scholarly contention)^[49] Ovid has been seen as taking on a persona in his poetry which is far more emotionally detached from his mistress and less involved in crafting a unique emotional realism within the text than the other elegists.^[50] This attitude, coupled with the lack of testimony which identifies Ovid's Corinna with a real person^[51] has led scholars to conclude that Corinna was never a real person and that Ovid's relationship with her is an invention for his elegiac project.^[52] Some scholars have even interpreted Corinna as a metapoetic symbol for the elegiac genre itself.^[53]

Ovid has been considered a highly inventive love elegist who plays with traditional elegiac conventions and elaborates the themes of the genre;^[54] Quintilian even calls him a "sportive" elegist.^[55] In some poems, he uses traditional conventions in new ways, such as the paraklausithyron of Am. 1.6, while other poems seem to have no elegiac precedents and appear to be Ovid's own generic innovations, such as the poem on Corinna's ruined hair (Am. 1.14). Ovid has been traditionally seen as far more sexually explicit in his poetry than the other elegists.^[56] His erotic elegy covers a wide spectrum of themes and viewpoints; the Amores focus on Ovid's relationship with Corinna, the love of mythical characters is the subject of the Heroides, and the Ars Amatoria and the other didactic love poems provide a handbook for relationships and seduction from a (mock-)"scientific" point of view. In his treatment of elegy, scholars have traced the influence of rhetorical education in his enumeration, in his effects of surprise, and in his transitional devices.^[57] Some commentators have also noted the influence Ovid's interest in love elegy in his other works, such as the Fasti and have distinguished his "elegiac" style from his "epic" style. Richard Heinze in his famous Ovids elegische Erzählung delineated the distinction between Ovid's styles by comparing the Fasti and Metamorphoses versions of the same legends such as the treatment of Ceres-Proserpina story in both poems. Heinze demonstrated that, "whereas in the elegiac poems a sentimental and tender tone prevails, the hexameter narrative is characterized by an emphasis on solemnity and awe..."^[58] His general line of argument has been accepted by Brooks Otis, who wrote:

"The gods are 'serious' in epic as they are not in elegy; the speeches in epic are long and infrequent compared to the short, truncated and frequent speeches of elegy; the epic writer conceals himself while the elegiac fills his narrative with familiar remarks to the reader or his characters; above all perhaps, epic narrative is continuous and symmetrical... whereas elegiac narrative displays a marked asymmetry..."^[59]

Otis wrote that in the Ovidian poems of love, he "was burlesquing an old theme rather than inventing a new one."^[60] Otis states that the Heroides are more serious and, though some of them are "quite different from anything Ovid had done before [...] he is here also treading a very well-worn path" to relate that the motif of females abandoned by or separated from their men was a "stock motif of Hellenistic and neoteric poetry (the classic example for us is, of course, Catullus 66)."^[60] Otis also states that Phaedra and Medea, Dido and Hermione^{[disambiguation needed ]} (also present in the poem) "are clever re-touchings of Euripides and Vergil."^[60] Some scholars, such as Kenney and Clausen, have compared Ovid with Virgil. According to them, Virgil was ambiguous and ambivalent while Ovid was defined and, while Ovid wrote only what he could express Virgil wrote for the use of language.^[61]

Legacy[link]

Criticism[link]

A 1484 figure of Ovide Moralisé, edition by Colard Mansion.

Ovid's works have been interpreted in various ways over the centuries with attitudes that depended on the social, religious and literary contexts of different times. It is known that since his own lifetime, he was already famous and criticized. In the Remedia Amoris, Ovid reports criticism from people who considered his books insolent.^[62] Ovid responded to this criticism by writing the following: "Gluttonous Envy, burst: my name’s well known already:/it will be more so, if only my feet travel the road they’ve started./But you’re in too much of a hurry: if I live you’ll be more than sorry:/many poems, in fact, are forming in my mind."^[63] After such criticism subsided, Ovid became one of the best known and most loved Roman poets during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.^[64] The authors of the Middle Ages used his work as a way to read and write about sex and violence without orthodox "scrutiny routinely given to commentaries on the Bible".^[65] In the Middle Ages the voluminous Ovide Moralisé, a French work that moralizes 15 books of the Metamorphoses was composed. This work then influenced Chaucer. Ovid's poetry provided insipration for the Renaissance idea of humanism, and more specifically, for many Renaissance painters and writers. Montaigne, for example, alluded to Ovid several times in his Essais, specifically in his comments on Education of Children when he says:

"The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age."^[66]

Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1859. National Gallery (London).

In the 16th century, some Jesuit schools of Portugal cut several passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the Jesuits saw his poems as elegant compositions worthy of being presented to students for educational purposes, they also felt his works as a whole might corrupt students.^[67] Jesuits took much of their knowledge of Ovid to the Portuguese colonies. According to Serafim Leite (1949), the ratio studiorum was in effect in Colonial Brazil during the early 17th century, and in this period Brazilian students read works like the Epistulae ex Ponto to learn Latin grammar.^[68] In Spain Ovid is both praised and criticized by Cervantes in his Don Quixote where he warns against satires that can exile poets as it happened to Ovid. ^[69] In the 16th century, Ovid's works were criticized in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered that a contemporary translation of Ovid's love poems be publicly burned in 1599. The Puritans of the following century viewed Ovid as pagan, thus as an immoral influence.^[70] John Dryden composed a famous translation of the Metamorphoses into stopped rhyming couples during the 18th century, when Ovid was "refashioned [...] in its own image, one kind of Augustanism making over another."^[64] The Romantic movement of the 19th century, in contrast, considered Ovid and his poems "stuffy, dull, over-formalized and lacking in genuine passion."^[64] Romantics might have preferred his poetry of exile.^[71] The picture Ovid among the Scythians, painted by Delacroix, portrays the last years of the poet in exile in Scythia, and was seen by Baudelaire, Gautier and Edgar Degas.^[72] Baudelaire took the opportunity to write a long essay about the life of an exiled poet like Ovid.^[73] These informations show that the exile of Ovid had some influence in 19th century Romanticism since it makes connections with its key concepts such as the wildness and the misunderstood genius.^[74]

Ovid's Influence[link]

Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.

Literary and artistic[link]

See the website "Ovid illustrated: the Renaissance reception of Ovid in image and Text" for many more Renaissance examples.

• (c.800–810) Moduin, a poet in the court circle of Charlemagne, adopts the pen name Naso.
• (12th century) The troubadours and the medieval courtoise literature
• (13th century) The Roman de la Rose, Dante Alighieri
• (14th century) Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, Juan Ruiz
• (15th century) Sandro Botticelli
• (16th century–17th century) Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Marston, Cephalus and Procris; Narcissus
• (17th century) John Milton, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, 1605 and 1615, Luis de Góngora's La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 1613, Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin, 1651, Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis by Peter Paul Rubens, c.1620
• (1820s) During his Odessa exile, Alexander Pushkin compared himself to Ovid; memorably versified in the epistle To Ovid (1821). The exiled Ovid also features in his long poem Gypsies, set in Moldavia (1824), and in Canto VIII of Eugene Onegin (1825–1832).
• (1916) James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a quotation from Book 8 of Metamorphoses and introduces Stephen Dedalus. The Ovidian reference to "Daedalus" was in Stephen Hero, but then metamorphosed to "Dedalus" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses.
• (1920s) The title of the second poetry collection by Osip Mandelstam, Tristia (Berlin, 1922), refers to Ovid's book. Mandelstam's collection is about his hungry, violent years immediately after the October Revolution.
• (1951) Six Metamorphoses after Ovid by Benjamin Britten, for solo oboe, evokes images of Ovid's characters from Metamorphoses.
• (1960) God Was Born in Exile, the novel by the Romanian writer Vintila Horia about Ovid's stay in exile (the novel received the Prix Goncourt in 1960).
• (1960s–2010s) Bob Dylan has made repeated use of Ovid's wording, imagery, and themes.
• (1978) Australian author David Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life is about Ovid's exile in Tomis.
• (1998) In Pandora, by Anne Rice, Pandora cites Ovid as a favorite poet and author of the time, quoting him to her lover Marius^{[disambiguation needed ]}.
• (2000) The Art of Love^{[disambiguation needed ]} by Robin Brooks, a comedy, emphasizing Ovid's role as lover. Broadcast May 23 on BBC Radio 4, with Bill Nighy and Anne-Marie Duff (not to be confused with the 2004 radio play by the same title on Radio 3).
• (2004) The Art of Love^{[disambiguation needed ]} by Andrew Rissik, a drama, part of a trilogy, which speculates on the crime which sent Ovid into exile. Broadcast April 11 on BBC Radio 4, with Stephen Dillane and Juliet Aubrey (not to be confused with the 2000 radio play by the same title on Radio 4).^[75]
• (2006) American musician Bob Dylan's album Modern Times contains songs with borrowed lines from Ovid's Poems of Exile, from Peter Green's translation. The songs are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break", and "Spirit on the Water".
• (2007) Russian author Alexander Zorich's novel Roman Star is about the last years of Ovid's life.
• (2008) “The Love Song of Ovid”, a two-hour radio documentary by Damiano Pietropaolo, recorded on location in Rome (the recently restored house of Augustus on the Roman forum), Sulmona (Ovid’s birthplace) and Constanta (modern day Tomis, in Romania). Broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,CBC Radio One, Dec. 18 and 19, 2008.
• (2012) The House Of Rumour, a novel by British author Jake Arnott, opens with a passage from Matamorphoses, Book XII: 39-63, and the author muses on Ovid's prediction of the internet in that passage.

Dante twice mentions him in:

• De vulgari eloquentia, along with Lucan, Virgil, and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (ii, vi, 7)
• Inferno ranks him with Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Virgil (Inferno, IV,88).

Retellings, adaptations, and translations of Ovidian works[link]

• (1767) Apollo et Hyacinthus, an early opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• (1938) Daphne, an opera by Richard Strauss
• (1949) Orphée A film by Jean Cocteau, retelling of the Orpheus myth from the Metamorphoses
• (1978) Ovid's Metamorphoses (Translation in Blank Verse), by Brookes More
• (1978) Ovid's Metamorphoses in European Culture (Commentary), by Wilmon Brewer
• (1991) The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr
• (1997) Polaroid Stories by Naomi Iizuka, a retelling of Metamorphoses, with urchins and drug addicts as the gods.
• (1994) After Ovid: New Metamorphoses edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun is an anthology of contemporary poetry envisioning Ovid's Metamorphoses
• (1997) Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes is a modern poetic translation of twenty four passages from Metamorphoses
• (2000) Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Phil Terry, a short story collection retelling several of Ovid's fables.
• (2002) An adaptation of Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman, entitled the same name, was performed at the Circle in the Square Theatre ^[76]
• (2006) Patricia Barber's song cycle, Mythologies
• (2011) A stage adaptation of Metamorphoses by Peter Bramley, entitled "Ovid's Metamorphoses" was performed by Pants on Fire, presented by the Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation at the Flea Theater in New York City and toured the United Kingdom

Gallery[link]

• 

  Ovid by Anton von Werner.

• 

  Ovid by Luca Signorelli.

• 

  Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid (c.1640), by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld.

Notes[link]

See also[link]

Literature portal

• Ars amatoria
• Amores
• Metamorphoses
• Latin literature
• Prosody (Latin)

References[link]

Еditions[link]

• McKeown, J. (еd), Ovid: Amores. Text, Prolegomena and Commentary in four volumes, Vol. I-III (Liverpool, 1987-1998) (ARCA, 20, 22, 36).
• Maureen B. Ryan, Caroline A. Perkins (ed.), Ovid's Amores, Book One: A Commentary (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011) (Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture, 41).

Further reading[link]

• Brewer, Wilmon, Ovid's Metamorphoses in European Culture (Commentary), Marshall Jones Company, Francestown, NH, Revised Edition 1978
• More, Brookes, Ovid's Metamorphoses (Translation in Blank Verse), Marshall Jones Company, Francestown, NH, Revised Edition 1978
• Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Charles Martindale. Cambridge, 1988.
• Richard A. Dwyer "Ovid in the Middle Ages" in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 1989, pp. 312–14
• Federica Bessone. P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula XII: Medea Iasoni. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1997. Pp. 324.
• Theodor Heinze. P. Ovidius Naso. Der XII. Heroidenbrief: Medea an Jason. Mit einer Beilage: Die Fragmente der Tragödie Medea. Einleitung, Text & Kommentar. Mnemosyne Supplement 170 Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1997. Pp. xi + 288.
• R. A. Smith. Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil. Ann Arbor; The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp.ix+ 226.
• Michael Simpson, The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. 498.
• Philip Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 408.
• Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium. Edited by Geraldine Herbert-Brown. Oxford, OUP, 2002, 327 pp.
• Susanne Gippert, Joseph Addison's Ovid: An Adaptation of the Metamorphoses in the Augustan Age of English Literature. Die Antike und ihr Weiterleben, Band 5. Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 2003. Pp. 304.
• Heather van Tress, Poetic Memory. Allusion in the Poetry of Callimachus and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Mnemosyne, Supplementa 258. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2004. Pp. ix, 215.
• Ziolkowski, Theodore, Ovid and the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 262.
• Desmond, Marilynn, Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 232.
• Rimell, Victoria, Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 235.
• Pugh, Syrithe, Spenser and Ovid. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 302.
• Montuschi, Claudia, Il tempo in Ovidio. Funzioni, meccanismi, strutture. Accademia la colombaria studi, 226. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2005. Pp. 463.
• Pasco-Pranger, Molly, Founding the Year: Ovid's Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar. Mnemosyne Suppl., 276. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2006. Pp. 326.
• Martin Amann, Komik in den Tristien Ovids. (Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, 31). Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2006. Pp. 296.
• P. J. Davis, Ovid & Augustus: A political reading of Ovid's erotic poems. London: Duckworth, 2006. Pp. 183.
• Peter E. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 541.
• Andreas N. Michalopoulos, Ovid Heroides 16 and 17. Introduction, text and commentary. (ARCA: Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs, 47). Cambridge: Francis Cairns, 2006. Pp. x, 409.
• R. Gibson, S. Green, S. Sharrock, The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 375.
• Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 206.
• Johnson, Patricia J. Ovid before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. (Wisconsin Studies in Classics). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Pp. x, 184.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ovid

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ovid

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Ovid

• University of Virginia, "Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text"
• Works by Ovid at Project Gutenberg
• Nihon University, "Ovid Metamorphoses: Paris 1651(1619)
• Multilingual Translation
  • schueler-latein.de
• Latin and English translation
  • Perseus/Tufts: P. Ovidius Naso Amores, Ars Amatoria, Heroides (on this site called Epistulae), Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris. Enhanced brower. Not downloadable.
  • Sacred Texts Archive: Ovid Amores, Ars Amatoria, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris.
  • The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso; elucidated by an analysis and explanation of the fables, together with English notes, historical, mythological and critical, and illustrated by pictorial embellishments: with a dictionary, giving the meaning of all the words with critical exactness. By Nathan Covington Brooks. Publisher: New York, A. S. Barnes & co.; Cincinnati, H. W. Derby & co., 1857 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
• Original Latin only
  • Latin Library: Ovid Amores, Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, Fasti, Heroides, Ibis, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris, Tristia.
  • Works by Ovid
• English translation only
  • New translations by A. S. Kline Amores, Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, Fasti, Heroides, Ibis, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Metamorphoses, Remedia Amoris, Tristia with enhanced browsing facility, downloadable in HTML, PDF, or MS Word DOC formats. Site also includes wide selection of works by other authors.
  • Two translations from Ovid's Amores by Jon Corelis.
  • English translations of Ovid's Amores with introductory essay and notes by Jon Corelis
  • Perseus/Tufts: Commentary on the Heroides of Ovid
• SORGLL: Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, 183-235, (Daedalus & Icarus); read by Stephen Daitz

v t e Poems by Ovid Metamorphoses Amores Ars Amatoria Remedia Amoris Heroides Fasti Tristia Epistulae ex Ponto Ibis Medicamina Faciei Femineae

Ted Hughes
Born	Edward James Hughes (1930-08-17)17 August 1930 Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England
Died	28 October 1998(1998-10-28) (aged 68) London, England
Occupation	Poet, playwright, writer
Nationality	English
Spouse(s)	Sylvia Plath (m. 1956–1963) Carol Orchard (m. 1970–1998)
Partner(s)	Assia Wevill (1962–1969)
Children	Frieda Hughes Nicholas 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 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation.^[1] Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.

Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her death^[2] 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.^[3]

In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[4]

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

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^[5] 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.^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[7] 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").^[8] Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything."^[9]

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.^[7] His parents ran a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop.^[6] 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.^[8] 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.^[7]

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.^[7][10] 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.^[6] By 16 he had no other thought than being a poet.^[7]

During the same year Hughes won an open exhibition in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but chose to do his National Service first.^[11] 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".^[6] He learnt many of the plays by heart and memorised great quantities of Yeats' poetry.^[7]

Career[link]

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.^[7][12] 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."^[7] 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.^[13][14] His first published poetry appeared in Chequer.^[13] A poem "The little boys and the seasons", written during this time, was published in Granta, under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing.^[15]

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.^[13] 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.^[16] 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.^[7] Plath's mother was the only wedding guest and she accompanied them on their honeymoon to Benidorm on the Spanish coast.^[18] Hughes's biographers note that Plath did not relate her history of depression and suicide to him until much later.^[7] 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.^[18] On returning to Cambridge, they lived at 55 Eltisley Avenue. That year they each had poems published in The Nation, Poetry and The Atlantic.^[19] 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.^[18] 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.^[7]

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.^[18] 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.^[20] 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.^[7] 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.^[7]

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[link]

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.^[21] 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."^[22][23] Some feminists argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide.^[24][25][26] 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."^[25] In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath;^[25][27] other feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name.^[28] 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.^[25][29]

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^[21] and some feminists argued that Hughes had essentially driven her to suicide and therefore should not be responsible for her literary legacy.^[21] 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.^[7]

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.^[30][31] 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.^[7]

1970–1998[link]

The Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank - an 18th century mill-owner's house, once Hughes' home.

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.^[32] 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.^[33] 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.^[33] In 1993 he made a rare television appearance for Channel 4, which included him reading passages from his 1968 novel "The Iron Man".

Lumb Bank in the Colden Valley

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^[34] 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."^[35]

Wikinews has related news: Son of poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Plath, died by suicide in his home in Alaska on 16 March 2009 after battling depression.^[36]

Work[link]

Homage to Ted Hughes by Reginald Gray. Held by Bankfield Museum, Yorkshire

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.^[37]

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.^[38]

In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of European plays, mainly classical ones. HisTales 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.^[39]

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.^[40]

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.^[3] 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."^[41]

In 2011 several previously unpublished letters from Hughes to Craig Raine were published in the literary review Areté.^[42] 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[link]

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.^[43] 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".^[43]

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.^[10]

Hughes' later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian and ecological viewpoint.^[43] He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.^[43]

Commemoration and legacy[link]

A memorial walk was inaugurated in 2005, leading from the Devon village of Belstone to Hughes' memorial stone above the River Taw, on Dartmoor.^[44][45]

On 28 April 2011 a memorial plaque for Hughes was unveiled at North Tawton by his wife Carol.^[32] 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.^[46] A Ted Hughes Festival is held each year in Mytholmroyd, led by the Elmet Trust,^[47] an educational body founded to support the work and legacy of Hughes.^[48]

In 2010 it was announced that Hughes would be commemorated with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.^[49] On 6 December 2011 a slab of Kirkstone green slate was ceremonially placed at the foot of the memorial commemorating T. S. Eliot.^[50][51] 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.^[52] 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).^[53] 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:^[52] "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[link]

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.^[54] The library archive is accessible through the British Library website.^[55] 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.^[56]

Ted Hughes Award[link]

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”.^[57] 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.^[58]

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.^[58]

Selected works[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• 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[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ted Hughes

Profiles[link]

• Drue Heinz (Spring 1995). "Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry No. 71". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1669/the-art-of-poetry-no-71-ted-hughes. 
• 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[link]

• 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