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Sep 23, 2023 12 min

Ted Hughes’s ‘Gaudete’

from The Long and Short Hosted by London Review of Books

Originally conceived as a film script, Gaudete is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, Gaudete shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, Gaudete is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlasapple⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/tlassignuppod⁠

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Ted Hughes’s ‘Gaudete’

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This episode was published on September 23, 2023.

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