Poet doubly grateful for access to the Uni’s Ted Hughes Network

A LEADING writer has pledged to aid the University of Huddersfield in its mission to develop a deeper understanding of the work of Ted Hughes, the man he described as “the greatest poet of the last century”.

Christopher Reid has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the University, and at the ceremony he said that one of his proudest achievements was to have edited for publication the letters of Hughes, the Poet Laureate who was born and raised in Yorkshire. 

The 700-page volume of letters “changed the general notion of what Ted Hughes did, what he was and what he means to poetry and life in general,” said Mr Reid, who worked with the Laureate on editing some of his late poems, including Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters – “great works that changed poetry for ever”.

The University of Huddersfield is home to the Ted Hughes Network, dedicated to scholarly investigation of the poet, and Mr Reid – an award-winning poet and author himself – was a special guest at its inaugural meeting.  At the ceremony, which conferred his honorary doctorate, he said he would be eager to help the University in understanding Ted Hughes and poetry in general.

“I am doubly and trebly grateful to the University for allowing me access to that wonderful resource, the Network, and I look forward to many years of association with it,” said Mr Reid.

The oration for his Honorary Doctorate was delivered by University of Huddersfield Creative Writing Lecturer Dr Steve Ely, who directs the Ted Hughes Network.  He outlined Mr Reid’s career, including his period as an editor at Faber and Faber, and the publication of his own works, such as A Scattering, a collection of moving elegies for his wife, which became a Costa Book of the Year.

“The mammoth task of editing the Letters of Ted Hughes came to fruition with the publication of the book of that name in 2007, revealing Hughes to be one of the great literary letter writers of all time and providing access to the poet’s vast intellectual, artistic and human hinterlands for the first time – an immeasurable service to scholarship, and one assumes, a labour of love,” said Dr Ely.

He added that one of Mr Reid’s current projects is the soon-to-be-published Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs, a canine companion to T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.