Tom Paulin writes:

This is a thick volume – more than 700 pages – but it serves as a taster for the many volumes of collected letters which I hope are still to come. When those letters are published Hughes should be established with Keats, Hopkins, the early Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the most important letter-writing poets. The Selected Letters is sensitively and meticulously edited by Christopher Reid (the one mistake I noted is the attribution of Antigone to Euripides), and in his introduction he says that an edition of three or four volumes, each just as big, could have been assembled. He has excluded letters that deal with environmental issues because their technical complexity and ‘immersion in the unresolved political moment’ would have made them impossible to annotate except at inordinate length. He also notes that often the letters end exactly at the bottom of the page, and yet appear to say as much as, and no more than, the occasion warranted. It is only when we have the whole, no doubt unwieldy, mass of the letters before us that we can begin to make sense of the driven, joyous, intent imagination they portray.

(LRB 29 November 2007)

Faber | hardback 756 pp. |ISBN: 9780571221387