According to the New York Times, the Ted Hughes estate has denied a biographer access to the poet’s archives. The Hughes estate has gone far to derail Jonathan Bate’s biography, even withdrawing permission to quote the poet at length. The Times speculates that these abrupt actions renew “suggestions that there may be secrets the family still wishes to keep hidden.”
In honor of Poetry Month, read Helen Vendler in the LRBon Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Even in profound depression, Hopkins remained immutably honest in aesthetic judgment, a great and rare virtue . . . counterbalancing to the end his anxious fears and his recurrent sorrows.”
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Lorrie Moore’s new collection for the New York Review of Books.
In “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons,” Zadie Smith writes about climate change, “You can’t fail to detect in the elegists a fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when you get right down to it, as much of a perverse desire for the apocalypse as the evangelicals we supposedly scorn.”
Tomorrow, the New York Times is releasing two new digital products: an $8-a-month iPhone app, NYT Now, that offers a selections from the paper; and Times Premium, a luxe $45-a-month digital subscription option that offers perks such as behind-the-scenes looks at the Times newsroom and free e-books.