This splendid, brave, mad imagination

The last letter in Ted Hughes’s collected letters is to his aunt Hilda, recounting the way in which the Queen awarded him, two weeks before his death, the Order of Merit. It reads like a dream of wish-fulfilment:

Then I gave [the Queen] a copy of Birthday Letters — and she was fascinated. I told her how I had come to write it, & even more so how I had come to publish it. I felt to make contact with her as never before. She was extremely vivacious & happy-spirited — more so than ever before. I suppose, talking about those poems, I was able to open my heart more than ever before — and so she responded in kind.

This is not a considered letter, as that repeated ‘more than ever before’ suggests, but a passionately felt one. It’s well known that Hughes’s relationship, as laureate, with the monarch and her family was warmer and more direct than any laureate’s with a monarch since Tennyson’s with Queen Victoria. It was not just a shared knowledge of livestock and an enjoyment of fishing. Rather, it was a shared belief in the mystical, twinned status of queen and court poet. No one else could have done the job half as well, and some of Hughes’s laureate poems, particularly ‘Rain-charm for the Duchy’, are as wonderful as anything he ever wrote. I don’t suppose they talked much about Jung or anapaestics together: but I guess that two minds in unique positions recognised each other, and I can well believe that he opened his heart and she responded in kind.

Ted Hughes was an enormous, astonishing figure, from that first stupendous volume, A Hawk in the Rain to the very last, Birthday Letters. He looks like probably the greatest poet in English since Auden, whom he didn’t care for much.