The Ascent of Ted Hughes: Conquering the Calder Valley

Abstract

Those not familiar with the biographical details could be forgiven for assuming that Ted Hughes was something of a stick in the mud.¹ This is because of Hughes’ enduring connection with the Calder Valley, a deeply scored river system running between the Pennine watershed to the west and Halifax to the east. Hughes was born in that valley in 1930, in the small town of Mytholmroyd, and for the rest of his life continued to refer to the area in his poems and in his prose writing, both obliquely and directly. His Remains of Elmet, written in response to Fay Godwin’s black-and-white photographs of the locality, confirmed Hughes’ faithful relationship with the upper Calder through powerful and dramatic evocations of the landscape, and the book is nothing like the extracurricular or coffee-table project it might have been in the hands of a less committed writer. In fact, Remains of Elmet is, in my view, not only the definitive poetic guide to the environs of Hughes’ homelands, but his single most important publication, a kind of concordance to the whole of his work, the poems within it serving as manifestos or blueprints for his later work and philosophical concerns.