We learn from the Faber publicity blurb that Ted Hughes’s appointment as Poet Laureate is the ‘most inspired’ since Tennyson’s. We also learn that Hughes, in discharging his Laureate duties, ‘has found the means to express a comprehensive vision of reality and nationhood that goes far beyond the courtly doggerel of most of his predecessors’. Comprehensive vision of reality? Well, call me a barbarian, but bollocks to that.

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