Ted Hughes: To W. H. Auden

Length / Form 21 lines, 5 stanzas of 4 lines, 1 stanza of a single line

Relationship to Classical text Extended similes and associations drawn from nature and antiquity (‘As the riddled boy in the dust / to lofty Apollo’s son’, ‘Saturn and Mercury joined in you’

Comment Written and published to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of W.H. Auden. It was Auden who was on the judging panel when Hughes’ The Hawk in the Rain was elected to win first prize in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New York poetry competition. The opening lines allude to Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’.

Note Printed in the Sunday Times, 19th February 1967, p.28 (Source: K. Sagar and S.Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography: 1946-1995, 2^nd edition, London: Mansell, 1998.)