3 Review(s)

This book tells the untold story of Hughes's Mexborough period (1938-1951). Drawing on archive and neglected sources and interviews with Hughes's Mexborough contemporaries, the author considers issues such as Hughes's class-status in Mexborough, his obsessive hunting, trapping and fishing and traces the development of his characteristic mythopoeic imagination, which was to become so important to his poetry throughout his life. The importance of key locations - Old Denaby, Crookhill, Mexborough Grammar School - to Hughes's intellectual and poetic development is expounded, as are his key South Yorkshire relationships - with his inspirational teachers Pauline Mayne and John Fisher, his friend John Wholey and John's older sister Edna, with whom Ted fell in love and for whom he wrote several poems. An inventory and analysis of Hughes's precocious Mexborough juvenilia and the several mature poems with direct South Yorkshire links is made, demonstrating that his Mexborough period had a direct and enduring influence on some of his best work - 'Pike', 'Sunstroke', 'A motorbike' - and that Ted Hughes was indeed 'made in Mexborough'.