The two love poems were written by the former Poet Laureate in a book kept by Enid Wilkin when he used to visit her home in the village of Patrington, East Yorkshire, where he was on national service with the RAF in the early 1950s.
Enid, now Mrs En
id Bates, thought they were marvellously romantic, but when she showed them to her teacher at Malet Lambert School, in Hull, he was less than impressed: "He said that it was rubbish — that it was someone trying to emulate Shakespeare."
The retired social worker decided to sell them through antiquarian bookseller Alex Alec-Smith, from Winestead, and accepted an offer of £2,000 from Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, which already holds his archive.
The university said they were delighted with a manuscript that "gives us a glimpse of Hughes's first steps on the road to becoming one of the major poets of his generation."
One is an early version of the poem, Song, which he included in his first collection in 1957, the other is previously unpublished.
Mrs Bates said: "I think I was too young to appreciate them. But I like words and it sounded romantic to me at the time. We billeted two young men at our home, Johnny Oliver and George Daggitt and George and Ted were good friends. I believe they were involved with VHF radio. Ted used to come to our house and then they would go off out together.
"I was just a kid to them. I remember Ted poking the fire all the time – we had huge logs and the wood lice used to be crawling out.
"He was so serious and always looked a bit miserable. I remember him humming Beethoven's Ninth and asking me to fill in the deep notes, but he was still very serious."
Mrs Bates, who followed Hughes's career via George Daggitt and his wife Mary, who was also at Malet Lambert, added: "I suppose English language and literature were my two favourite subjects: I think it is his use of words, they are obviously very deep."
But her teacher didn't think so.
She added: "I can remember going pleased that I'd got these poems even though I didn't know Ted Hughes was going to be as famous as he was. "The teacher said something like he's trying to emulate Shakespeare, it's not very good and I can remember feeling quite let down."
After two years' national service, Hughes, who was born in Mytholmroyd, went up to Cambridge where he was to meet and later marry American poet Sylvia Plath. Hughes later wrote that he was inspired to write Song "as such things should in your 19th year — literally a voice in the air at about 3am when I was on night duty". He died of cancer in 1998, aged 68.
