Ted Hughes Contemporary Literature in English

1. Ted HughesContemporary Literature in English Natália Pikli Department of English Studies ELTE

2. Ted Hughes (1930-1998)Edward James Hughes, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire – Poet Laureate 1984-89

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.

7. The Thought-Fox I imagine this midnightmoment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’sloneliness 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, thatnow 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.

8. 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?

9. 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.”)

10. 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

11. 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

12. Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls, Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert On 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 half With the wounded end hanging out. He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman And it crept in deeper and up To peer out through her eyes Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly, quickly Because 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. A Childish Prank

13. 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!

14. Agnus Dei Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonStained glass panel, unknown artist, c. 1850

15. 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.”

16. 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”)

17. 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.”

18. 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’

19. 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 afresh By my ignorance of the simplest things”

20. 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

21. 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