Introduction

Abstract

On the afternoon of Saturday, 22 October 2011, I was in Mytholmroyd, listening to Keith Sagar give a talk as part of the Elmet Trust’s annual Ted Hughes Festival — and trying to suppress a growing sense of frustration. My frustration had nothing to do with Keith’s presentation, which was typically engaging and enlightening. Nor had it been provoked by any of the other lectures and performances I had attended, which had been similarly worthwhile. My issue was with the central premise of the festival itself. Hundreds of people had gathered in Mytholmroyd to celebrate the life and work of Ted Hughes, who had been appropriated by the town and the Elmet Trust as ‘Mytholmroyd’s Poet Laureate’¹ and seemingly universally accepted as such by the wider literary world. Yet, as anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of his life knows, Hughes spent only his first eight years in Mytholmroyd, leaving the town with his family in 1938 and subsequently returning (to the town itself and to the wider Upper Calder Valley area) for only relatively brief visits and sojourns.² Although it is undeniable that Hughes’s early years in Mytholmroyd were hugely significant to his development, there is another Yorkshire town with a greater claim to be regarded as the place that formed him as a poet.