Court Green

Last updated

Court Green is a house in North Tawton, Devon, England. It was the home the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved to in late August 1961. [1]

Contents

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.

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

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath wrote most of the Ariel (1965) 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

Ted Hughes wrote Crow (1970) 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.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

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

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and 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 The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works.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 honor 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.

<i>Ariel</i> (poetry collection) 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 relationship 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 composed on October 12, 1962, one month after her separation from Ted Hughes and four months before her death. It was published posthumously in Ariel during 1965 alongside many other of her final poems, such as "Tulips" and "Lady Lazarus". It has subsequently become a widely anthologized poem in American literature.

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.

"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.

Jacqueline Rose is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath, originally included in Ariel, which was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. This poem is commonly used as an example of her writing style. It is considered one of Plath's best poems and has been subject to a plethora of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and thoughts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">North Tawton</span> Town in Devon, England

North Tawton is a small town in Devon, England, situated on the river Taw. It is administered by West Devon Council. The population of the electoral ward at the census 2011 was 2,026.

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

Montagu Square is a garden square in Marylebone, London. It is centred 550 metres north of Marble Arch. It spans 810 feet (250 m) by 150 feet (46 m). and is oriented on an axis of about NNW. Save for No.s 27 to 29 the long sides (NNW-SSE) are Grade II listed residential buildings.

<i>Crow</i> (poetry)

Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow is a literary work by poet Ted Hughes, first published in 1970 by Faber & Faber, and one of Hughes' most important works. Writing for the Ted Hughes Society Journal in 2012, Neil Roberts, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, said:

Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes [sic] oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow, mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath. He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered. He described Crow as his masterpiece...

<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.

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 death by 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">The Applicant</span>

"The Applicant" is a poem written by American confessional poet Sylvia Plath on October 11, 1962. It was first published on January 17, 1963 in The London Magazine and was later republished in 1965 in Ariel alongside poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" two years after her death.

<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 wedding night.

References

  1. O'Brien, Maeve. "Visiting Court Green". 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