SOURCE: "Ted Hughes and the Laureateship," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1985, pp. 3-5.

[In the following essay, Roberts discusses Hughes's appointment as England's Poet Laureate.]

The reported expectation of the 'literary world' that the laureateship would be awarded to a poet who had announced that he no longer wrote, and surprise that instead the immensely prolific Ted Hughes was chosen, makes its own comment. But even many of Hughes's admirers must, when the announcement was made, have thought it incongruous. Thinking of Hughes, the celebrator of everything in nature that threatens the decorousness of human arrangements, who has pronounced civilisation an evolutionary error, as a 'member of the royal household' is like thinking of Emily Brontë as lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. As David Holbrook remarked in a not otherwise perceptive critique, referring to the award of the Queen's Medal for Poetry, it is not possible to imagine...