Christopher Reid, himself a poet, says the task of editing the former laureate's letters was surprisingly straightforward.

"I was given his wife's address book and plundered it for names and wrote off to lots of people, almost all of whom replied very enthusiastically, and within weeks I had hundreds and hundreds of letters."

Reid was Faber & Faber's poetry editor during the last eight years of Hughes's life, and says the book pretty much wrote itself.

"It was plain from the outset that the material was so wonderful that nothing could go wrong unless I cocked it up, and I wanted the letters to choose themselves where possible. There are many great letters I had to leave out but I don't regret that, because the ones there form a complete picture."

The Letters of Ted Hughes took Reid, who teaches creative writing at Hull University, three years to complete.

"I hope it corrects a lot of misconceptions about him, particularly the myth of his relationship with Sylvia Plath which was based on his rather dignified silence. For 30 years, he refused to comment until Birthday Letters, and that silence allowed people to invent all kinds of fantasies about their life together."

Reid first met Hughes while working for Faber. "I was in awe of him before I met him, but he was incredibly friendly, and immediately you were invited into a very trusting relationship by him.

"There's this idea he was a stern, reclusive, hard man, but, in fact, he was great company, he loved gossip and he's not the Ted Hughes that people have in their imaginations at all, and I hope his true character comes through in these letters."

One thing that surprised him while piecing together the book was how focused Hughes was on his literary vision.

"The main revelation for me was how, almost from the first letter, he had this literary idea of himself and always knew he was going to be a writer.

"This surprised me because I thought he might have wandered into it as vaguely as most of us do."

Much has been made of some of Hughes's more controversial interests but Reid believes they were simply part of his fascination with the world.

"My feeling about his interest in astrology and the occult and some of the more mysterious regions of science, is that he was afraid of the terrible despotism of the rational mind and he knew, as a poet, that he had to find his ideas at another level."

Reid believes, though, that readers will warm to Hughes.

"His letters are very intimate and he wrote to a lot of people, even those he didn't know. There's an amazing one from an Oxford student who wrote several questions and got a 20-page letter in response, and it's the most marvellously revealing letter in which he talks about his own vision and how he developed as a poet."

Although Hughes was aware that one day such a book was likely to materialise, Reid doesn't believe his letters were written with this in mind.

"They don't feel as though they're written for some other person to read, they're solely directed to the recipient," he says.

"I think Ted Hughes is up there with people like Blake and Wordsworth as a central part of our literary story."

Reid has his own reason to thank him.

"About a week before he died, Ted rang me up. I knew he'd been ill, but at the end of the conversation he asked me about my own writing and I said it wasn't getting a look-in because I was too busy.

"So he typed a load of aphorisms on four or five pages and faxed them to me. They included two by Goethe, the first one said, 'Unless you give yourself wholeheartedly to a project nothing will come of it', which is obvious in a way.

"But the second one said, 'When you give yourself wholeheartedly to a project, providence will step in and help you'. This is arguable, but it's a nice thought.

"Then, a week later, he died, and I think he was trying to tell me something about getting on with my poetry. A few weeks later, I resigned."So, I owe him an awful lot and this book is an act of homage, of thanks."

TED HUGHES
Born: Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, August 17 1930
Died: Devon, October 28, 1998
Poet Laureate: 1984-98
Selected poetry: The Hawk in the Rain (1957); Lupercal (1960); Crow (1970); Tales from Ovid (1997); Birthday Letters (1998)
Children's Books: How the Whale Became; The Iron Man; Under the North Star