Most readers think an authorized biography, written with the help of the subject’s family, gives the writer an advantage. But Jonathan Bate’s unauthorized life of Ted Hughes (1930–98) has turned out better without such help. He’s free from obligation and pressure, censorship and constraint. No longer tempted to pad his book with quotations that he doesn’t have to pay for, he now quotes with “fair use” and is more selective and concise. A biographer frequently encounters a family who refuses to cooperate and then criticizes the author for making errors it could easily have corrected. Hughes’s widow, Carol, first gave and then withdrew permission to quote his literary work. Before reading Bate’s book, she publicly contradicted his statement that friends accompanying Hughes’s body from London to his home in Devon stopped for a good lunch on the way. But the recollection of Bate’s unnamed source, which could be confirmed by other friends, is just as valid as Carol’s. The friends probably did stop to eat on the 200-mile drive. Later on, she felt it made her seem disrespectful.

Bate’s subtly intelligent and elegantly written narrative is enhanced by vivid details and acute perceptions. He convincingly observes that “the task of the literary biographer is . . . to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life.” His theme is that “Hughes’s poetic self was constantly torn between a mythic or symbolic and an elegiac or confessionaltendency” (his italics). In Hughes’s poetry, “the