SOURCE: "Riddled With Craziness," in Spectator, Vol. 272, No. 8675, March, 1994, pp. 28-9.

[In the following review, Levi discusses the craziness in Hughes's collection of essays, Winter Pollen.]

There are nearly all the essential pieces of an autobiography of this most surprising and entertaining of poets scattered among the 30 years of essays in this book. But I suspect a psychoanalyst has got at him, because there is also some curious psychological raving, including a piece of lunatic presumption psychoanalysing the poetry and history of T. S. Eliot, based partly on his 'religious vision of St Sebastian'. This is what it must have been like talking to Ezra Pound in the madhouse, but Ezra's mind was as sane then as it ever got, and Ted Hughes' centenary piece for Eliot is a deviation. Other pieces (not all) are simply brilliant. No one has ever written better about Dylan Thomas or Sylvia...