Lecture: Jonathan Bate on "Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life"

Ted Hughes’s will stipulates that there be no official biography of his life. Scholar Jonathan Bate worked with the Hughes’s estate for four years to create an account of a “literary life.” The estate suddenly revoked its permission to quote freely from the archive, held at the British Library. Bate challenged himself to find a way to continue his project, which ironically became more of a biography than the original plan to emphasize the development of a poetic voice. “I am disappointed at losing so much of Hughes’s wonderful written voice, but it is actually proving good writerly discipline to weave his thoughts in with my own words and not to fall back on big blocks of quotation,” Bate wrote last year in The Guardian. Hear his story during the annual Stanley Burnshaw Lecture, followed by a reception and book signing.