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Podcast: The Daily Poem
Episode: Ted Hughes' "The Thought-Fox"
Description: Ted Hughes, one of the giants of twentieth-century British poetry, was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. After serving in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archeology and anthropology and took a special interest in myths and legends. In 1956, he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who encouraged him to submit his manuscript to a first-book contest run by the Poetry Center. Awarded first prize by judges Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, The Hawk in the Rain (Faber & Faber, 1957) secured Hughes’s reputation as a poet of international stature. According to poet an...