...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it.… — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or… — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body,… — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
“I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked… — Ted Hughes Copy Share
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come. — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I… — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is… — Ted Hughes Copy Share Image
“I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your life Was a liner I voyaged in. Costly education had fitted you out. Financiers and committees and consultants Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish. You trembled with the new life of those engines. That first morning, Before your first class at College, you sat… — Ted Hughes Copy Share
He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will – That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention. — Ted Hughes Copy Share
“If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?" The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got… — Ted Hughes Copy Share
