Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I would like to look at the

work of Ted Hughes who was incidentally not that incidentally. He was poet laureate from

1984 to 1998 but I'm going to look at some of his earlier stuff today. I'm going to look

at a couple of poems actually the same age as me. Make of that what you will. He is Ted Hughes,

one of those poets who is a victim of his own biography. A bit like Dylan Thomas for example,

people are a bit more interested in what he did than what he wrote in direct contravention of what

the poet W. H. Orden said about poets' biographies. He said biographies should be about people who

did things rather than thought things and so he didn't really approve of poets' biographies. I'm

kind of with him on that. If I ever do a podcast call lives of the poets, I'll make up for all this

but I won't do that. I discovered Ted Hughes when I was a schoolboy. Weirdly at school poetry wasn't

really central to my reading. Reading wasn't that central to my reading until I got into my late

teens but the things that really start with me from school and something I never read now was

short stories. Three short stories I read at school still stick with me. One of them was called a

sound of thunder by Ray Bradbury the science fiction writer and I think it was the idea of the

butterfly effect which comes from that short story that you could go back and do a minor thing

in time and completely change the future and then another one which again really moved me and

stopped with me was a story called Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway and the third one was a 1967

short story by Ted Hughes called the Rain Horse and the Rain Horse I remember it so clearly and it's

a long long time ago. It was about a man who went back to where he grew up and he went back

in full office worker garb of the grey suit. I remember it as grey at least and he went for a walk

and it rained heavily and he got lost and he kept being attacked by this black horse that seemed to

represent the very raw wildness of nature read in tooth and claw as Alfred Lord Tennyson putty and

...