Court Green

Last updated

Court Green is a house on Essington Road in North Tawton, Devon, England. It was the home the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath [1] moved to in late August 1961. Plath left the house on 10 December 1962, while Hughes lived there on and off for the rest of his life. It is the current home of his widow Carol Hughes.

Contents

The house is listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England. [2]

Sylvia Plath at Court Green

Plath wrote most of the Ariel poems at Court Green. She composed "The Moon and the Yew Tree" about the ancient yew in the nearby churchyard, which could be seen from her bedroom window; the tree can still be seen today. The poem "The Bee Meeting" concerns an event which Plath observed just outside the wool factory on the River Taw near the house. Percy Keys, a neighbour of the Hughes during their time at Court Green, is mentioned in The Journals of Sylvia Plath, and his funeral is remembered in Plath's poem "Berck-Plage". Keys is buried in the graveyard on the hill above the house.

Ted Hughes at Court Green

Hughes wrote Crow and most of his later work at the house. He wrote standing at a lectern. Hughes died in 1998, and his friend Seamus Heaney read at the funeral service at the church across the lawn.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvia Plath</span> American poet and writer (1932–1963)

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ted Hughes</span> English poet and childrens writer (1930–1998)

Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

<i>Sylvia</i> (2003 film) 2003 British film

Sylvia is a 2003 British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells a story based on the real-life romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The film begins with their meeting at Cambridge in 1956 and ends with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ariel (poetry collection)</span> Poetry book by Sylvia Plath

Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was first released in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems of Ariel, with their free-flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems.

Assia Esther Wevill was a German Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, via Italy, then later England, where she had an affair with the English poet Ted Hughes. While she was a successful advertising copywriter and a talented translator of poetry, she is mainly remembered in the context of her relationships with Sylvia Plath and Hughes.

<i>Birthday Letters</i> 1998 poetry collection by Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes' death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1999. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized, and "explosive" marriage. Prior to Birthday Letters, Hughes had only explicitly mentioned Plath once before, in a poem titled 'Heptonstall Cemetery' from his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daddy (poem)</span> Poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath

"Daddy" is a poem written by American confessional poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written on October 12, 1962, four months before her death and one month after her separation from Ted Hughes. It was published posthumously in Ariel during 1965 alongside many other of her poems leading up to her death such as "Tulips” and "Lady Lazarus."

Frieda Rebecca Hughes is an English-Australian poet and painter. She has published seven children's books, four poetry collections and one short story and has had many exhibitions. Hughes is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist and poet Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death in 1998.

Aurelia Frances Plath was the wife of Otto Emil Plath, the mother of the American poet Sylvia Plath, and her brother Warren, and the grandmother of Frieda Rebecca Hughes and Nicholas Farrar Hughes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hardcastle Crags</span> Pennine valley in West Yorkshire, England

Hardcastle Crags is a wooded Pennine valley in West Yorkshire, England, owned by the National Trust. Historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, it lies approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) north of the town of Hebden Bridge and 10 miles (16 km) west of the town of Halifax. It gave the title to a poem by Sylvia Plath that was included in her 1960 debut collection The Colossus.

"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montagu Square</span>

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Lamb, Bloomsbury</span> Pub in Bloomsbury, London

The Lamb is a Grade II listed pub at 94 Lamb's Conduit Street, in the London Borough of Camden, London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larmer Tree Gardens</span>

The Larmer Tree Gardens near Tollard Royal in south Wiltshire, England, were created by landowner Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1880 as pleasure grounds for "public enlightenment and entertainment". They were the first private gardens opened for public enjoyment in the United Kingdom, and were free to enter. The 11-acre (4.5 ha) Grade II* listed gardens are within the Rushmore Estate in Cranborne Chase, an ancient royal hunting ground and now an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Nicholas Farrar Hughes was a British and American fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. Hughes was the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath and English poet Ted Hughes, and the younger brother of artist and poet Frieda Hughes. He and his sister were public figures as small children due to the circumstances of their mother's widely publicized suicide.

<i>The Colossus and Other Poems</i> Book by Sylvia Plath

The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, first published by Heinemann, in 1960. It is the only volume of poetry by Plath that was published before her death in 1963.

<i>The Hawk in the Rain</i> 1957 poem collection by Ted Hughes

The Hawk in the Rain is a collection of 40 poems by the British poet Ted Hughes. Published by Faber and Faber in 1957, it was Hughes's first book of poetry. The book received immediate acclaim in both England and America, where it won the Galbraith Prize. Many of the book's poems imagine the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and the eponymous hawk. Other poems focus on erotic relationships, and on stories of the First World War, Hughes's father being a survivor of Gallipoli.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Otto Plath</span> American entomologist

Otto Emil Plath was a German-American writer, academic, and biologist. Plath worked as a professor of biology and German language at Boston University and as an entomologist, with a specific expertise on bumblebees. He was the father of American poet Sylvia Plath and Warren Plath, and the husband of Aurelia Plath. He wrote the 1934 book Bumblebees and Their Ways. He is notable for being the subject of "Daddy", one of his daughter's most well-known poems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martinhoe</span> Village in Devon, England

Martinhoe is a small settlement and civil parish in North Devon district of Devon, England. Martinhoe is within the Exmoor National Park, the smallest National Park in England. In the 2011 census Martinhoe Parish was recorded as having a population of 159. Martinhoe is in the Combe Martin ward, for elections to the district council. Martinhoe's local government takes the form of a parish meeting and as such has no parish council nor elected parish councillors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rugby Street</span> Street in London, England

Rugby Street, formerly known as Chapel Street, is a street in the Bloomsbury district of the London Borough of Camden. It was built between around 1700 and 1721 on land that was given to Rugby School in Warwickshire and now forms part of London's Rugby Estate. Many of its buildings are listed by Historic England such as the grade II The Rugby Tavern. It was renamed Rugby Street in 1936 or 1937. In the post-war period, number 18 was the home to many creative people and the house where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath spent their first night together.

References

  1. O'Brien, Maeve. "Visiting Court Green". The Plath Diaries. The Plath Diaries. Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2015.
  2. Historic England, "Court Green (1105340)", National Heritage List for England , retrieved 5 January 2016

50°48′00″N3°53′42″W / 50.8001°N 3.8951°W / 50.8001; -3.8951