Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid

Abstract In his introduction to Tales from Ovid (1997), Ted Hughes places passion at the centre of Ovid’s work: Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. Or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis—passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.