Ted HughesContemporary Literature in English

Natália Pikli

Department of English Studies

ELTE

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)Edward James Hughes, Mytholmroyd,

Yorkshire – Poet Laureate 1984-89

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – (1956-1963)(Birthday Letters, 1989)

• Yorkshire country childhood – nature and myth, memories of war and masculinity

• Cambridge: literature → anthropology, archeology

• St. Botolph’s Review• Sylvia Plath – Fulbright

scholarship: marriage• Poetry prizes for Hawk in the

Rain, 1957 ‘a poet of the wild/animals’

• Lupercal, 1960• Suicide of Plath 1963 – editor

for Plath’s Ariel 1966• Wodwo, 1967• 1969: suicide of Assia Wevill

– dark violence of Crow 1970

• HUGHES’s poetry: A reaction against the ‘negative sublime’, the resigned detachment and wry observations of mostly urban ‘Movement’ poets (Philip Larkin) in the 1950s – Larkin: ‘Deprivation is to me what daffoldils were to Wordsworth’

• For Hughes: Nature is the main isnpiration – it is ‘amoral, has nothing to do with morality, compassion or justice’, brutish strength

• Al Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry, 1962, 1966 – ‘beyond the gentility principle’, beyond the idea of politeness, order, a more or less benevolent God

• HUGHES: brutality and fierce power of nature= humanity’s fall into scientific rationality/into an alienation from the organic world – modern man: narrowing his vision

BUT• Image, symbol, myth and nature + violence = elemental

forces, a reinvention of the essential ties between humanity and the world

• archaic energies of instinct and feeling are lost, need to

be embraced by pre-Christian mythologies/symbols- CROW

• The basic OTHERness of animal life, no sentimentalizing – awe and fear in the observer

• poet/artist – a medium of uniting two worlds

His poetic voice and technique:• formal simplicity (first volume- trochees and spondees

– Northerner/Middle English, against the grain)• economy• jarred rhythms• repetitiousness• magical incantation • presenting an image and thought in a context of raw

action - physical vividness of descriptions.• Poems: usually tell a story or have narrative

elements.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page

where my fingers move.

[…]

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

ars poetica

• first poem in Hawk in the Rain

• Inside/outside, human/animal – the creative process

• ambiguity – ‘prints’, blank page/snow

• sensual experience and observation

• self-reflexivity

• Imagination and reality – imaginary fox?

Animals – predatory instincts: Relic and Pike

– Tennyson: ‘nature’s red in tooth and claw’ • Relic: a jawbone found ”at the sea’s edge”= a

relic – philosophy of nature: ”Nothing touches but, clutching, devours” – a ‘religion’

• Pike (William Blake: The Tiger) – the perfect predator, the predatory instinct prevailing – from observation/description to personal memory to mythical depth and collective memory (”legendary depth: / It was as deep as England”) and finally - to intimate and direct contact (”That rose slowly toward me, watching.”)

Wodwo - wild man between human and animal

• Middle English wudewose (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) – on the threshold of nature and human

• ”What am I?” repeated, a resounding question

• Human intellect and consciousness – a burden or a blessing?

• ”What am I doing here in mid-air?”• ”I seem to have been given the

freedom / of this place what am I then?”

• Strange world, unknown, frightening - ”I’ll go on looking.”

• free-flowing verse with repetitions - uncertainty

Crow, 1970 – Leonard Baskin VOICE

• a sequence of loosely related short poems, addressing ultimate religious questions

• a narrative: God vs Crow, games• an antagonist Bible, a myth that

parallels and denies the biblical answers – survival and egoism

• a creation myth, or rather a creation-and-destruction myth, influenced by oral poetry, mystic incantations and spells, closely drawing on the trickster myths of North America’s native inhabitants

• The trickster myth has a hero who is always wandering, always hungry, who is not guided by socially accepted conceptions of good and evil – his only will is for survival (Examination at the Womb-Door – Buddhism)

• primerlike vocabulary, simple syntax (unsubordinated sentences), impersonal point of view

• Admiration of brutish strength, of unyielding energy and survival

• Crow ‘swallowing up’ everything – words, meaningful philosophies

A Childish Prank

Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls,

Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inertOn the flowers of Eden.God pondered.

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

Crow laughed.He bit the Worm, God's only son,Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail halfWith the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman

And it crept in deeper and upTo peer out through her eyesCalling it's tail-half to join up quickly,

quicklyBecause O it was painful.

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.

Woman awoke to see him coming.Neither knew what had happened.

God went on sleeping.

Crow went on laughing.

February 17th (1974)negative sacrifice – birth and death

Moortown Diary (1979)• diary entry (1970, Hughes settled in Devon, farm) • first person singular agent of the poem gives an account

of an ill-delivering a lamb which had to be killed (head hacked off) in order to save its mother – death in birth

• unemotional, dryly detailed naturalistic description, no self-explanatory insertions

• Structure: lamb - born – head - body (key words)• Lamb of God=Jesus Christ (John the Baptist, Mass)

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us!

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us peace!

Agnus Dei Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Stained glass panel, unknown artist, c. 1850

Birthday Letters

• Ted Hughes, 1998 (Forward Prize for Poetry)

”My book Birthday Letters is a gathering of the occasions on which I tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife – not thinking to make it a poem, thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her there listening. Except for a handful, I never thought of publishing these pieces until last year – when quite suddenly I realized I had to publish them, no matter what the consequences.”

Birthday Letters, 1989

• Sylvia, 2003 (Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig)

• The feminist myth of Hughes ‘killing’ Sylvia and Wevill – silence of Hughes till 1989

• (Love Song, 1970: ”In their dreams they held each other hostage” ”in the morning they wore each other’s face”)

Confessional poetry/memory/evocation

• an ardently anti-confessional poet vs literary tradition of confessions (Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Hardy, etc.) and media-ruled postmodern hunger for ‘confession’ (TV shows)

• publishing them before his death – ‘ a sensation of inner liberation’

• the compelling force of poetry: Hughes, 1995 - ‘Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic – makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actaully saying something we desperately need to share.”

• BIRTHDAY – death/birth-rebirth• Memory – past and present fused – trying to

recreate the original experience as if in the present/consciusness of the past

• fatalism (peach, Spain, Emily Bronte, bat-bite)• evocation: we see Sylvia Plath ‘vibrant with life

and radiating death’ • basic opposition (American, urban, alpha

student vs Northerner, son of a joiner) and ‘writing out of one brain’

Fulbright Scholars

• dying Hughes – recalling his first glimpse at Sylvia• uncertainty of memory: ”Were you among them?” – ”I

remember that thought. Not / Your face.”• The future hidden in the past, which is presented as

recreated present: ”Noted your long hair, loose waves - / Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it híd.” – ”Your exaggarated American / Grin for the cameras, the judes, the strangers, the frighteners.”

• Eating fresh peach for the first time (cf. Prufrock ‘dare I eat a peach?’) –

”At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afreshBy my ignorance of the simplest things”

narrative/’Greek tragedy’/dialogue

• Otto Plath, the dead father – Hughes the husband – ‘ghosts’/Sylvia’s drama

• Your Paris – You Hated Spain – basic differences of vision, conscious vs unconscious (”Spain frightemed you. Spain / Where I felt at home.” ”Spain was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver/ You dared not wake with”)

• Wuthering Heights – places/writers/fates haunting – still ”your huge / Mortgage of hope”

• 9 Willow Street: memory attached to places – ordinary events → premonition: bat-bite/sacrifice and danger: ”This was the bat-light we were living in: death”

• Reflecting on himself/their relationship/Sylvia’s poems

Ted Hughes: poet, writer, playwright

• National Theatre, Peter Brook – Orghast – a play in an invented language, myth of Prometheus

• books for children (Iron Man)

• Ted Hughes Award – funded by Carol Ann Duffy, the present Poet Laureate