Abstract
In September 2010, at the conference at Pembroke College, Cambridge which prompted many of this volume’s essays, Jonathan Bate looked beyond the Collected to offer an ambitious prospectus for his own forthcoming literary life of Ted Hughes. But his lecture, ‘The Complete Being of Ted Hughes’, carried its own wrily allusive warning against presuming to know too much, and Bate argued for a critically rigorous engagement with the daunting range of Hughes’ published work and archival resources. Thus a biographer might well find legitimate interest in the fishing diaries of a man known to be ‘a passionate fisherman’ and ‘passionate about fishing’. ‘The literary biographer says, by contrast, “we are only interested in the fishing diaries in so far as they impact upon the importance of fish and fishing in the poems”.’1 A few minutes into his talk, this was the last time Bate mentioned fish, fishing or fishing diaries.
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Notes
Terry Gifford (2011), ‘Hughes’ Social Ecology’, in Gifford (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge University Press), p. 88.
Roderick Haig-Brown (1948), A River Never Sleeps (London: Collins), pp. 240–1.
Keith Sagar (1999), ‘The Poet and the Critic’, in Nick Gammage (ed.), The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber), p. 236.
Peter Redgrove (1983), ‘Windings and Conchings’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 November, p. 1238.
Edna Longley (1984), Review of The Achievement of Ted Hughes and River, Poetry Review 73:4, pp. 59–60.
Leonard Scigaj (1991), ‘The Ceaseless Gift: River’, in Ted Hughes (Boston: Twayne), pp. 133–9.
A.D. Moody (1987), ‘Telling It Like It’s Not’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), Yearbook of English Studies (London: Modern Humanities Research Association), p. 176.
Neil Roberts (2006), Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 143.
Ted Hughes (2008), The Spoken Word: Poetry in the Making (London: British Library/BBC)
Ted Hughes (1983), ‘Taw and Torridge’, in Anne Voss Bark (ed.), West Country Fly Fishing (London: Batsford), p. 35.
Conrad Voss Bark (1986), A Fly on the Water (London: Allen & Unwin), pp. 20–1.
Ann Skea (1994), Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Press), p. 216.
Terry Gifford (1999), ‘“Go Fishing”: An Ecocentric or Egocentric Imperative?’, in Joanny Moulin (ed.), Lire Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems 1957–1994 (Paris: Editions du Temps), p. 153.
Charles Tomlinson (1983), ‘Coombe’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 November, p. 1238.
Graham Swift (2009), ‘Fishing with Ted’, in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (London: Picador), p. 324.
Thomas Pero (1999), ‘So Quickly it’s Over’, Wild Steelhead & Salmon 5:2, p. 56.
Ted Hughes (1988), ‘Letter to the Editor’, Trout and Salmon (July), p. 33.
Ted Hughes and Peter Keen (1983), River (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 120–4.
Clive Wilmer (1994), Poets Talking: Poet of the Month Interviews from BBC Radio 3 (Manchester: Carcanet), p. 147.
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© 2013 Mark Wormald
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Wormald, M. (2013). Fishing for Ted. In: Wormald, M., Roberts, N., Gifford, T. (eds) Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276582_9
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