This collection of sixteen articles, written by leading specialists in Classical and English literature, is an important contribution to the critical assessment of Ted Hughes, one of the most popular and controversial English poets of the late 20th century. The chapters are arranged broadly chronologically according to Hughes's publications, and deal with different aspects of his engagement with the culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, including translations, original works, classical thought, and ideologies in his drama and verse. Hughes is revealed as a leading figure in literary reception of the Classics in 20th century poetry, a sharply intelligent and sensitive reader of some of the world's foundational texts.

• Ted Hughes and the Classics


• Hughes's first translation


• Can (modern) poets do classical drama? The case of Ted Hughes


• Eliot's Seneca, Ted Hughes's Oedipus


• Living myths


• Mutilated towards alignment?': Prometheus on his Crag and the 'Cambridge School' of anthropology


• Hughes's myth: the Classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds


• Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the Laureate poetry of Ted Hughes


• 'A holiday in a rest home': Ted Hughes as vates in Tales from Ovid


• Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid


• The transformation of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid


• Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy


• Ted Hughes: allusion and poetic language


• The Hughes Version: commercial considerations and dramatic imagination


• Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation


• Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides