How was Ted Hughes's poetry affected by Sylvia Plath? What is the importance of his early life on the Yorkshire moors with his elder brother, that he called Paradise? How did writing Birthday Letters affect his attitude to his life and career? This book attempts to answer these questions by a close study of Hughes's poetic development.

NEIL ROBERTS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. With Terry Gifford he published Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (1981), and he has also written books on Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry, Peter Redgrove, D.H. Lawrence, George Meredith and George Eliot, and edited the Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry.