Description: (HUGHES, Ted.) 1994 Autograph Letter Signed. An unpublished 2 page Autograph Letter Signed by Ted Hughes (1930-1998) to a “Mr Fallon”, responding to an invitation to attend a commemorative celebration for the World War One Gallipoli campaign, and discussing how he never completed his “first ambitious poetic plan…. to write at length about Gallipoli”, dated 9 Jan. 94, written on both sides of a Court Green, North Tawton, Devon, headed card, 10.5cm x 14.5cm, near fine. The letter reads as follows: “9 Jan. 94 Dear Mr Fallon – Well, your invitation is a mighty honour. If I can do something I will. But I cannot promise. My first ambitious poetic plan was to write at length about Gallipoli. But my father served there in the Lancs Fusiliers, and I learned early that for a non-combatant to say anything, about that campaign, that could honourably exist in the same world as those who survived it – or even morso, did not survive it – would need divine help. So I never completed what I began. Now and again I have written small comments about it indirectly - in saying something about my father. Hardly suitable for a major commemorative celebration. Still, I will see if I can do something – but not promise. Sincerely Ted Hughes.” Ted Hughes father, William Hughes (1894-1981), was one of just seventeen soldiers in the Lancaster Fusiliers who survived the Gallipoli campaign. “Hughes wrote on a number of occasions about the way in which the First World War overshadowed his childhood and of the wider impact on the Calder Valley where he spent the first eight years of his life. Hughes explored this theme repeatedly throughout his career beginning with his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in poems such as Six Young Men and Bayonet Charge and returning in a number of later collections from Wodwo and Remains of Elmet to Wolfwatching…. It is interesting to note that the subject of Hughes and war is one of the less explored areas of the poet’s work…. As Dennis Walder Wrote, Hughes was a “war poet at one remove, writing out of the impact of memory – the individual memory of his father and the collective memory of English culture.” (Ted Hughes in Context, Edited by Terry Gifford, Cambridge University Press, 2018, Chapter 23: Hughes and War, by Helen Melody.)
Price: 950 GBP
Location: Bath
End Time: 2025-01-17T15:11:25.000Z
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Type: Historical
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