Ted Hughes generated more scandal than any English poet except Byron. But the power of these letters does not depend on their revelations about his private life. It issues from the radiant aliveness of his language and imagination. Mundane subjects whirl into comic fantasy – the potatoes in his vegetable patch “rumbling in the earth like contented elephant herds”, his peas “wandering the neighbourhood and assaulting the local beauties”. Animals and birds are endlessly reinvented – swifts zipping into their nests “like bullets into earth”, a stray hedgehog “snivelling and snuffling his heart out”, a cat washing itself “until its wrists look sore”. Write in your own way, he told Sylvia Plath, “and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room”. He can trap a whole culture in a dozen words. A Yorkshire boy in affluent, postwar America, he is amazed by the cars “like wingless airliners streaming through woods” and by the “Himalayan heaps” of food Americans eat. His love letters to Plath flame with physical sensation: “That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.”

Christopher Reid says that his edition is not a biography in disguise. All the same, no previous book has told us so much about Hughes’s life – his education, his reading, his interpretation of his own poetry, his thought on a swathe of subjects from our damaged environment to social class and fishing. Grammar school made him. In his first year, two women teachers saw and encouraged his talent for poetry. His English teacher, John Fisher, introduced him to Beethoven, who became one of his deities, and gave him Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, “the chief holy book of my poetic conscience”. The rest of his education took place on the Pennine moors with his elder brother, shooting, fishing and trapping wild creatures in “vast numbers” and developing the awareness of the animal world that floods his poetry. His avid reading in myth and folklore, spurred by Graves, led him to shamanism, the primitive religion in which the priest or shaman becomes both the sacrificial god and the divine animal, bonding with the natural and animal world that modern culture “tortures and destroys”.

His private religion and his knowledge of his poetic powers gave him enormous self-confidence, matchable, among English poets, only in the young Milton. Doing national service in the RAF at 19, he writes to a girlfriend that he will one day be “inurned in a temple over Trafalgar Square”. Like Milton, too, he had no intention of getting a job, or doing anything else that would hook him up to “the absurd, hysterical impersonal clock-kingdom legislation or daily commercial round”. His dedication to poetry was total and highly selective. Shakespeare, Blake and the Romantics, Yeats and Lawrence were paramount, the rest also-rans. At Cambridge (Fisher got him in by sending the Master of Pembroke College a batch of his poems), he got up at six every morning and read a Shakespeare play before nine o’clock. If you studied Shakespeare concentratedly for three years, he argued, “it would be thereafter your mind, and an anchor for all other reading or art”. He knew much of Shakespeare by heart, as well as all Yeats’s lyrics and the first book of the Aeneid, and he wrote to the secretary of state for education proposing that learning poetry by rote should be built into the examination system. In prose, Swift was “the only stylist” and “the bedrock from which every writer must start”. If schoolchildren learnt a page of The Modest Proposal by heart they would have “a guardian angel installed behind the tongue” that would save them from “the rubbish incoherence of the jabber in the sound waves”.

But critical or analytical prose of the kind he had to write at Cambridge was, he saw, a danger. He had a dream, now part of literary legend, in which a fox, singed and smelling of burnt hair, came into his room, put its paw on an essay he had been writing, leaving a bloody mark, and said “You are destroying us.” So he changed from English to anthropology. This trust in dreams and in his animal, instinctive, pre-verbal self brought with it a gamut of other beliefs, disturbing to people who like poets to be rational. His ouija board and tarot pack were of real importance to him. He spent “thousands of hours” studying astrology and requested Faber to publish his books only on days when “the special conditions of the earth’s electrical field” were propitious.

The link between poetry and the body was, for him, profound. He could tell, just from reading the plays, that Shakespeare “obviously” suffered from irregular heart rhythm. Poetry, like the “magnetism” of a faith healer, could repair damaged cells, whereas prose could do the opposite. After being diagnosed with cancer, he came to think that writing his prose treatise Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being had destroyed his immune system. Ever since the 17th century, English society had, he believed, mounted a systematic campaign of censorship and prohibition to stamp out truths like these, and to impose its puritanical restrictions on sexuality, which alone “carries the seeds of humanity and joy”.

He knew his beliefs exposed him to ridicule, but his letters make us see how vital they were for his poetry. He was entirely original. No English poet before him had cracked the shell of civilisation, as he does in Crow, and burst through to the dark places beyond. However well you think you know his work, his greatness as a poet can still take your breath away. A case in point is the little-known poem Plum-Blossom, enclosed here in a letter to Assia Wevill and published in the limited-edition Recklings. If his beliefs caused havoc in his personal relationships he took complete responsibility for it. “I don’t want ever to be forgiven”, he wrote to Sylvia’s mother after her suicide, “if there is an eternity I am damned in it.” When, seven years later, Assia killed both herself and their daughter, Shura, he again blamed himself: “If I could have only given her hope in slightly more emphatic words in that last phone conversation.”

In his introduction, Reid remarks how generous Hughes was as a letter writer, calling on a full range of verbal power, grace and wit even when penning run-of-the-mill correspondence. His generosity, not just in this, but in the joy he took in friends, ideas, reading and physical activity lights up these pages. Escaping civilisation always exhilarates him. On a fishing trip with his son Nicholas in Kenya, he writes of “the infinite happy security of living in the dirt like a baboon”. Reid’s succinct annotation allows the full, unique personality to blaze out unimpeded, and the result is magnificent. No other English poet’s letters, not even Keats’s, unparalleled as they are, take us so intimately into the wellsprings of his own art.

Read on . . .

book:
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Faber £8.99)
The powerful sequence of poems in which Hughes first created his own folk mythology

LETTERS OF TED HUGHES edited by Christopher Reid
Faber £30 pp780

Times Recommends

• Sarah Palin and the Palindromes: 7 extraordinary connections
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Podcasts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die