The Ted Hughes Collection includes various manuscript and typescript poem drafts. They include The Martydom of Bishop Farrar, Lust and Desire, Six Young Men, Egghead, The Horses, Famous Poet, Wind, Bayonet of Charge, Macaw and Little Miss, the Bedtime Story poems (published in Crow under different titles), Magical Dangers, Conjuring in Heaven, Rocket to Venus, Gog II, To be a Girl's Diary, Fern, Bad News Good!, Eating with Friends, As I sit Stoking my TV and The Thought Fox. Some of these have been heavily worked upon. There is also a small number of poems that appear not to have been published and/or are untitled. There is a small amount of correspondence, some scenarios possibly intended for television, scripts for radio plays and drafts of the plays The Demon and Orpheus and Eurydice. The majority of the archive comprises material related to Hughes's adaption of Seneca's Oedipus. This includes drafts of the play, proofs and printer's copies and correspondence related to this, accounts and correspondence concerning Hughes's transactions with The National Theatre with particular reference to a dispute over contract, and material relating to various productions. There are also two translations of Oedipus.

[ Note: In 1975 the University of Liverpool Library exchanged the original autograph drafts for the play Orpheus and Eurydice (ref.no. Hughes 4/3) for some other Ted Hughes MSS. We hold photocopies of the drafts for Orpheus and Eurydice. ]

The collection is organised under the following headings:

• Poem Drafts
• Correspondence
• Scenarios
• Plays
• Adaption of Seneca's Oedipus

The Ted Hughes collection consists of several different deposits and these have been maintained in their original order to reflect their provenance.

Edward (Ted) James Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Yorkshire to William Henry and Edith Hughes and enjoyed the rural existence, often hunting on the moors with his older brother Gerald. Hughes went to Cambridge University to read English at Pembroke College, later changing to Archaeology and Anthropology. He graduated in June 1954, the same month as one of his poems appeared in a Cambridge periodical for the first time. He met the American poet Sylvia Plath while at Cambridge and they married in June 1956. The same year Sylvia typed up a manuscript of Hughes and sent it off for a competition. The judges chose The Hawk in the Rain, the prize was publication by Harper and Hughes's first book was published in 1957. From then until his death Hughes published many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children.

Hughes moved with Sylvia to America in 1957 and taught English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts. In 1959 they toured the country and then spent several months in the writers' colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. At the end of 1959 they returned to England and settled in London until August, both leading productive literary lives. Hughes gradually grew tired of the city, however, and in September 1961 they moved to Devon. The couple's first child, Frieda, was born in 1960 and was shortly followed by Nicholas Farrar in 1962, but the same year the couple separated. After Plath's suicide in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry for nearly three years while editing and publishing her work, dividing his time between Devon and London. In 1966 he started writing the first Crow poems and Crow, perhaps his most famous work, was published in 1970, following Wodwo in 1967. Hughes was famed for his use of animals and they are a recurring feature throughout his work.

In 1970 he married Carol Orchard and finally settled in Devon. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984. Hughes continued to write and received the Whitbread Prize for two consecutive years in 1997 and 1998. He died of cancer on the 28 October 1998.