He emerged, all of a sudden, in 1957: the most explosive new poetic talent of the English post-war era. Poetry specialised, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of the everyday. The poetry of Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes, first published in a book called “The Hawk in the Rain” when he was 27, was unlike anything written by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric, it had a visionary fervour. Its most eye-catching characteristic was Hughes's ability to get beneath the skins of animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right, but they were also armorial devices—symbols of the countryside and lifeblood of the earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink.

　　It was not only England that thought so either. Hughes's book was also published in America, where it won the Galbraith prize, a major literary award. But then, in 1963, Sylvia Plath, a young American poet whom he had first met at Cambridge University in 1956, and who became his wife in the summer of that year, committed suicide. Hughes was vilified for long after that, especially by feminists in America. In 1998, the year he died, Hughes broke his own self-imposed public silence about their relationship in a book of loose-weave poems called “Birthday Letters”. In this new and exhilarating collection of real letters, Hughes returns to the issue of his first wife's death, which he calls his “big and unmanageable event”. He felt his talent muffled by the perpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publish his own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten.

　　The analysis is raw, pained and ruthlessly self-aware. For all the moral torment, the writing itself has the same rush and vigour that possessed Hughes's early poetry. Some books of letters serve as a personalised historical chronicle. Poets' letters are seldom like that, and Hughes's are no exception. His are about a life of literary engagement: almost all of them include some musing on the state or the nature of writing, both Hughes's own or other people's. The trajectory of Hughes's literary career had him moving from obscurity to fame, and then, in the eyes of many, to life-long notoriety. These letters are filled with his wrestling with the consequences of being the part-private, part-public creature that he became, desperate to devote himself to his writing, and yet subject to endless invasions of his privacy.

　　Hughes is an absorbing and intricate commentator upon his own poetry, even when he is standing back from it and good-humouredly condemning himself for “its fantasticalia, its pretticisms and its infinite verballifications”. He also believed, from first to last, that poetry had a special place in the education of children. “What kids need”, he wrote in a 1988 letter to the secretary of state for education in the Conservative government, “is a headfull [sic] of songs that are not songs but blocks of refined and achieved and exemplary language.” When that happens, children have “the guardian angel installed behind the tongue”. Lucky readers, big or small.

　　1.The poetry of Hughes’s forerunners is characteristic of ______

　　[A] its natural, crude flavor.

　　[B] its distorted depiction of people’s daily life.

　　[C] its penetrating sight.

　　[D] its fantastical enthusiasm.

　　2.The word “vilified” (Line 4, Paragraph 2)most probably means _____

　　[A] tortured

　　[B] harassed

　　[C] scolded

　　[D] tormented

　　3.According to the third paragraph, Hughes’s collection of letters are _____

　　[A] the exact reason responsible for both his fame and notoriety.

　　[B] personalized description of his double identity as a public and a private figure.

　　[C] reflections of his struggle between his literary devotion and the reality.

　　[D] his meditation and exploration on the literary world and the essence of literature.

　　4. From the letters, we may find the cause of Hughes’s internal struggle is _____

　　[A] his eager and unsatisfied passion for literature.

　　[B] that he is a part-private, part-public creature.

　　[C] that he is constrained by the fear of his privacy being exposed to the criticism of the public.

　　[D] the moral torment exerted by himself.

　　5. By “l(fā)ucky readers” in the last sentence, the author means_____

　　[A] children who are imparted with the beauty and wisdom of poetry.

　　[B] children who have a headfull of fantastic and verbally perfect songs.

　　[C] children who own blocks of refined and achieved and exemplary language.

　　[D] children who are believed to have the guardian angel installed behind the tongue.

　　參考答案：B C D C A

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