Letters Of Ted Hughes. Selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Faber, €40

Arguably the greatest English language poet since Yeats, Ted Hughes never conformed to the stereotype of the weedy, introverted writer.

A vigorous, rugged, outdoors man, a fisher of pike, salmon and women, Hughes was an obsessive letter writer, and while this 740-page selection represents only a quarter of his ext ant correspondence, it is an astonishing collection.

Among its many tantalising insights, his devotion to Sylvia Plath - his first wife - will surprise many. His earliest letter to her begins: ‘‘That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.” The notes which follow are stupefied with longing: ‘‘Love love love love love love, from your Ted,” he writes.

Yet Plath’s suicide in 1963, followed six years later by that of Hughes’s partner Assia Wevill, who also killed their child, was adopted as a cause ce¤ le' bre by the burgeoning women’s movement. Hughes was demonised, publicly, and the story of ‘‘the mysterious role in my life that her posthumous life has played’’ is well known.

But as Plath’s fame increased, so too did Hughes’s distance from her memory; his ‘‘dearest Sylvia’’ becomes simply ‘‘SP’’, another literary figure to be analysed and discussed. “I was the only person who could have helped her,” he says, ‘‘and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it.”

Despondent, Hughes transformed his grief into one of the most uncompromising poetries of the 20th century, becoming one of literature’s best known and most controversial figures.

Writing about a Faber party in 1960, he brings to life the famous Pride of Poets photograph, which first placed him in the company of TS Eliot, WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice.

Auden, says Hughes, has a face ‘‘like a Viking seaman’’, while ‘‘MacNeice was drunk and talked like a quick-fire car salesman’’. Spender was also drunk, ‘‘silly-giddy like Mabel Brown at her nine-year-old birthday party’’, but Eliot, meanwhile, ‘‘has been ill’’.

Other poets, such as Philip Larkin, were the subject of generous and fanciful dispatches which Hughes himself described as ‘‘fan’’ letters.

‘‘What a remarkable map of the heavens you’ve been carrying around,” says Hughes, enclosing the hand-drawn horoscope he cast for Larkin. And this to a man who wrote, in his own letters to Faber: ‘‘No, of course Ted’s no good at all. Not a single solitary bit of good.”

When he accepted the position of Poet Laureate in 1984 -which many believed would go to Larkin - Hughes found a wider platform for his poetry and ideas. He revitalised the role, particularly through his work with children (or ‘‘younger readers’’, as he liked to think of them), but critics found his Laureate verses to be trying, particularly their deliberate imperialistic overtures and their tendency towards flattery of the Royal Family.

Yet, in letters here, he shows an enduring attachment to the Monarchy, which makes his Laureateship less surprising.’ ‘Visited the Queen on Thursday,” he wrote to his brother.’ ‘Had a nice talk.”

More formal in his poetry, Hughes utilised Lions and crowns to represent the ‘‘twin totems’’ of British identity (consciously British now, where earlier, his concern had been with the English): ‘‘The Lion, for me, can be nostalgic pageantry but the crown quite real,” he writes.’ ‘Incomprehension of the Lion,” as expressed by critics, ‘‘is a sign that the country’s falling to bits.”

Hughes is wry and engaging when discussing his work. One note provides a wonderful close-reading - destined to be pillaged, wholesale, by literature students - of a poem from his first masterpiece, Crow, while a long letter discusses how his early nature poems evolved into the visceral iterations of sex and violence which comprise the great sequences of Cave Birds and Gaudete.

Only our sexuality, he declares, ‘‘carries the seeds of humanity and joy’’. But for all of this, Hughes was clear: ‘‘I would prefer to know as little as possible about what is written about my writing.” He had been burned before, of course, by the invasive interest of antagonistic Plath scholars.

Even posthumously, his personal life is closely guarded. One of the few failures of this volume is the absence of letters to Carol Orchard, the farmer’s daughter he married in 1970.S till, there are hints of his tenderness in letters to others.’ ‘My wife is a wonder,” he says. ‘‘After 18 years of marriage I’d do anything to marry her again tomorrow.”

As a poet and critic, Hughes was entirely unique. The correspondence here, touching on astrology, shamanism, Shakespeare, politics, farming, fishing, and all conceivable subjects between, is more varied and alive than the best poetry of many other writers. The published letters of his contemporaries, even Plath herself, seem drab and listless by comparison.

Val Nolan teaches Creative Writing and 20th century poetry at NUI Galway