Letter-writing is in danger of becoming a lost art. Who writes letters any more? We send texts, we tweet, we e-mail and blog: the handwritten missive becomes a rarer and rarer beast.

If you think that it is no loss, turn to the Letters of Ted Hughes. This remarkable volume, as inspiring as the Collected Poems, contains wonder on every page. It is an insight into the mind and heart of one of the most remarkable men of the 20th century, revealing his rigour, his questing nature, his near-universal curiosity and the depth of his love and care. Shortly after he married Carol Orchard — after the deaths of his wife Sylvia Plath in 1963 and partner Assia Wevill in 1969 he wrote to Peter Redgrove: “It seems a long time since I wrote you. When life has swallowed you, after chewing, there is still the being digested to go through and the osmosis into all active parts & organs, until what gets shat out in the clear air & sunlight & universal peace is no longer qualified to speak of what has passed. So silence, like a behemoth gone off, speaketh . . .”

It’s easy to imagine that Hughes’s silence would have been as powerful as his words — carefully edited here by Christopher Reid, who worked with him for eight years at Faber and Faber, and who had awful choices to make to produce a manageable volume. Reid, in his introduction, regrets what he has had to leave out; and draws attention, too, to the force of Hughes’s handwriting and how his letters often seemed to fit the page perfectly, as if by some plan. Here are letters to friends, lovers, family, fellow poets, critics, farmers — all the world, it seems. If you are feeling a little weary, a dip into this book will restore you.

Most moving are the letters to his children, Frieda and Nick. “What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences — and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.” So he wrote to Frieda, also a fine poet, when she was in her late teens. It is a great gift that words such as these can find a wider audience, too.

Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid (Faber and Faber, £14.99; Buy this book; 755pp)

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