Ted and Sylvia extract

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/5886550/Ted-Hughes.html

In February 1956, at a party to launch the short-lived St Botolph's Review, of which Hughes was a founding figure, he met a young American postgraduate from Newnham - Sylvia Plath.

After her first encounter with Hughes, Sylvia Plath described him in a letter to her mother as "a large, hulking, healthy Adam . . . with a voice like the thunder of God". Within a few months they became engaged, and soon afterwards were married. From the beginning it was, and for some years continued to be, an extremely close, intertwined relationship. Each gave the other much in the way of literary models, criticism, stimulus and support.

She was probably more practical, professional and ambitious, in the sense that her background gave her an instinct for the right moves to make: clean typescripts, stamped addressed envelopes, and also a notion of which were the proper journals and covetable prizes. He gave her a deeper, perhaps quieter, sense of purpose.

It was Sylvia's entry on Ted's behalf of a collection of typescript poems which, in late 1956, won him a first-publication award for The Hawk in the Rain. The judges were W H Auden, Marianne Moore and Stephen Spender. This ensured publication by Faber in London and Harper in New York in late 1957.

Thus began Hughes's upward literary career, a career only occasionally deflected. A succession of poems, children's books and plays followed, and, for a few years, a number of reviews by him in journals, not all of which have been reprinted.

Hughes was never properly a literary journalist, but there were times when he was a regular reviewer of children's stories, folklore, poetry, letters, anthropology and ecology.

His second book of poems, Lupercal, came in 1960. It contained several of the "animal" poems by which he came best known: Hawk Roosting, View of a Pig, An Otter, Pike, Thrushes. These began to be included in anthologies. In the 1960s, Hughes was accepted (in the words of A Alvarez) as "a poet of the first importance".

But that decade also brought Hughes the break-up of his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her suicide. These events marked him deeply, and remain part of the literary-biographical mythology. Sylvia Plath had a history of psychological difficulties and breakdowns before she met Hughes. He was undoubtedly unfaithful, most crucially with Assia Wevill, the wife of a Canadian poet living in London. This affair touched off the end of the marriage.