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Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

10 best books like Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (Jonathan Bate): Dart, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography, Collected Poems, 1943-2004, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, T.S. Eliot, Young Eliot: A Biography, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

Dart
AuthorAlice Oswald
Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic...
The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
AuthorEdmund Gordon
ISBN0701187557
Angela Carter is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and beguiling writers of the last century. Her work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastic and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range. Her life was as modern and as unconventional...
Collected Poems, 1943-2004
AuthorRichard Wilbur
ISBN0156030799
With a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur stands as one of America's preeminent men of letters. Collected Poems 1943-2004 is the comprehensive collection of Wilbur's astonishing, timeless work. It will serve as the most referenced trove of this beloved poet's best...
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life
AuthorLyndall Gordon
ISBN0393320936
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
AuthorStanley Plumly
ISBN0393065731
Posthumous Keats is the result of Stanley Plumly's twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romanticists. John Keats's famous epitaph—"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water"—helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before...
John Donne: The Reformed Soul
AuthorJohn Stubbs
ISBN0393062600
Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from Plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns...
Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
AuthorJohn Drury
ISBN1846142482
For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

'Love bade me welcome . . .'

'Teach me my God and King . . .'


George...
T.S. Eliot
AuthorPeter Ackroyd
ISBN0140171126
In the twentieth century, no Anglo-American poet or critic has matched the influence of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Despite his political and religious conservatism, Eliot was among the most innovative of the literary modernists, a figure to be reckoned with by admirers and critics alike. In his Whitbread...
Young Eliot: A Biography
AuthorRobert Crawford
ISBN0374279446
A groundbreaking new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets

On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a definitive biography of this poetic genius. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth century’s...
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
AuthorPaul Mariani
ISBN1451624379
A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century—Wallace Stevens—as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.

Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression...
John Keats: A New Life
AuthorNicholas Roe
ISBN0300124651
This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure...
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
AuthorRobert Chandler
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and...
"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare
AuthorJohn Clare
ISBN0374528691
Hail, humble Helpstone ...
Where dawning genius never met the day,
Where useless ignorance slumbers life away
Unknown nor heeded, where low genius tries
Above the vulgar and the vain to rise.
--from "Helpstone"

"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare is the first anthology...
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
AuthorRichard Holmes
ISBN0375708383
Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium...
The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
AuthorAndrea Pitzer
ISBN1605984116
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov's life and works — notably Pale Fire and Lolita — bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic authors.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then...
Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner
AuthorFranny Moyle
ISBN0670922692
The extraordinary life of J. M. W. Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his...
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
AuthorAndrew Wilson
ISBN1582344116
The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.

For...
Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love
AuthorYehuda Koren
ISBN0786718617
The failure of the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has always been considered from one of two conflicting viewpoints: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades has been a third perspective on the events that brought their marriage to its ill-fated end, the story of another—the other—woman:...
New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012
AuthorCharles Simic
ISBN0547928289
“It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic’s work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight.” -Los Angeles Times


For over fifty years, Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant and innovative poetic...
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
AuthorAdam Sisman
ISBN0142001759
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk....
Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956
AuthorSylvia Plath
ISBN0571328997
Sylvia Plath's renown as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets is beyond dispute, but she was also one of its most captivating correspondents. This remarkable, collected edition of Plath's letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically...
Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet
AuthorElaine Feinstein
ISBN0393049671
Although Ted Hughes's genius was recognized early and he ended his days as England's Poet Laureate, his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life, and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963. Many people have held his adultery...
Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal
AuthorJay Parini
ISBN0385537565
An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century 

The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s Empire...
A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety
AuthorDonald Hall
ISBN1328826341
“Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori titled ‘Essays After Eighty’ (2014) and now ‘A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.’ They’re up there with the best things he did.” —Dwight Garner,  New York Times

From the former poet laureate...
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