Tim Kendall
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199562022
- eISBN:
- 9780191707636
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562022.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the war poetry of Ted Hughes. War is the abiding concern of Hughes's poetry. As a teenager beginning to write in the early 1940s, he viewed contemporary conflict through the ...
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This chapter explores the war poetry of Ted Hughes. War is the abiding concern of Hughes's poetry. As a teenager beginning to write in the early 1940s, he viewed contemporary conflict through the lens of the past, and the fear that his elder brother's war would prove as terrible as their father's became his ‘permanent preoccupation’. His post-war poetic maturity continued to perceive experience through that lens: Hughes characterizes his poems as ‘battleground[s]’ where his imagination, excited by ‘the war between vitality and death’, celebrates ‘the exploits of the warriors of either side’.Less
This chapter explores the war poetry of Ted Hughes. War is the abiding concern of Hughes's poetry. As a teenager beginning to write in the early 1940s, he viewed contemporary conflict through the lens of the past, and the fear that his elder brother's war would prove as terrible as their father's became his ‘permanent preoccupation’. His post-war poetic maturity continued to perceive experience through that lens: Hughes characterizes his poems as ‘battleground[s]’ where his imagination, excited by ‘the war between vitality and death’, celebrates ‘the exploits of the warriors of either side’.
Luke Ferretter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625093
- eISBN:
- 9780748671694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625093.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New ...
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This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New Yorker. Previous critics have examined Salinger's influence on Plath. Here I add a discussion of the women writers for the New Yorker that influenced Plath most – Jean Stafford, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mavis Gallant. The latter's Green Water, Green Sky is a particularly significant precursor of The Bell Jar. (3) Women's magazine fiction of the 1950s (4) Women's madness narratives, such as Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit. (5) Ted Hughes, who wrote numerous plot sketches for Plath to write up into stories. The mutual influence of Plath's and Hughes' stories, particularly in the genre of fable, is also discussed.Less
This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New Yorker. Previous critics have examined Salinger's influence on Plath. Here I add a discussion of the women writers for the New Yorker that influenced Plath most – Jean Stafford, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mavis Gallant. The latter's Green Water, Green Sky is a particularly significant precursor of The Bell Jar. (3) Women's magazine fiction of the 1950s (4) Women's madness narratives, such as Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit. (5) Ted Hughes, who wrote numerous plot sketches for Plath to write up into stories. The mutual influence of Plath's and Hughes' stories, particularly in the genre of fable, is also discussed.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter describes the creation of a poetry group in the 1950s, whose members included Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Australian bookseller Peter Porter, and BBC producer George ...
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This chapter describes the creation of a poetry group in the 1950s, whose members included Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Australian bookseller Peter Porter, and BBC producer George MacBeth. The Group may be considered a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed the first proper poetry workshop in England. However, Group meetings had a distinct flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own. The Group also perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network that started in Oxford and Cambridge, and brought its members into contact with poets who had been very much outside both.Less
This chapter describes the creation of a poetry group in the 1950s, whose members included Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Australian bookseller Peter Porter, and BBC producer George MacBeth. The Group may be considered a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed the first proper poetry workshop in England. However, Group meetings had a distinct flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own. The Group also perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network that started in Oxford and Cambridge, and brought its members into contact with poets who had been very much outside both.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, ...
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This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.Less
This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent ...
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This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.Less
This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.
Rand Brandes
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780989082693
- eISBN:
- 9781781382417
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780989082693.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This essay examines W. B. Yeats's influence on Ted Hughes, who shared with the former a profound investment in esoteric realms, and Hughes's appropriation of Yeats. None of Yeats's successors have ...
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This essay examines W. B. Yeats's influence on Ted Hughes, who shared with the former a profound investment in esoteric realms, and Hughes's appropriation of Yeats. None of Yeats's successors have followed him with the discipline and determination of Hughes into the realms of the esoteric. Yeats's belief in the poetic and political power of magic, mysticism and the mythic gave Hughes the spirit confidence he needed to push through personal tragedy and global despair. Hughes's sensitivity to Yeats's work and workings is the result of a lifelong engagement with the poetry and the mythological as well as occult principles and practices that inform it. This essay considers the shared occult preoccupations of Hughes and Yeats and argues that it was Hughes's vision of Yeats as “a mystical warrior fighting for the soul of his nation” that led Hughes to conceive of himself as a poet, a figure that is not only creative but also magical.Less
This essay examines W. B. Yeats's influence on Ted Hughes, who shared with the former a profound investment in esoteric realms, and Hughes's appropriation of Yeats. None of Yeats's successors have followed him with the discipline and determination of Hughes into the realms of the esoteric. Yeats's belief in the poetic and political power of magic, mysticism and the mythic gave Hughes the spirit confidence he needed to push through personal tragedy and global despair. Hughes's sensitivity to Yeats's work and workings is the result of a lifelong engagement with the poetry and the mythological as well as occult principles and practices that inform it. This essay considers the shared occult preoccupations of Hughes and Yeats and argues that it was Hughes's vision of Yeats as “a mystical warrior fighting for the soul of his nation” that led Hughes to conceive of himself as a poet, a figure that is not only creative but also magical.
Keith Sagar
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313479
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry ...
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A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. This book probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics — including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes' poem ‘A Dove Came’ through its evolving drafts — reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes' work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to the author of this book, a detailed chronology of Hughes' life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story ‘Crow’.Less
A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. This book probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics — including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes' poem ‘A Dove Came’ through its evolving drafts — reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes' work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to the author of this book, a detailed chronology of Hughes' life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story ‘Crow’.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310119.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines Hughes' works and his relationship with Plath. The purpose of all serious poetry is to find a shape and meaning in the chaos of experience. For the whole of his career Hughes ...
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This chapter examines Hughes' works and his relationship with Plath. The purpose of all serious poetry is to find a shape and meaning in the chaos of experience. For the whole of his career Hughes sought appropriate myths, or adaptations or amalgamations of myths, to help him to place his own life in the context of permanent or recurrent experience in a world larger than the merely human.Less
This chapter examines Hughes' works and his relationship with Plath. The purpose of all serious poetry is to find a shape and meaning in the chaos of experience. For the whole of his career Hughes sought appropriate myths, or adaptations or amalgamations of myths, to help him to place his own life in the context of permanent or recurrent experience in a world larger than the merely human.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310119.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter focuses on the mythic nature of Hughes' imagination. It argues that Hughes' imaginative world was deeply mythic, in the sense of both drawing on the body of myth we have inherited and ...
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This chapter focuses on the mythic nature of Hughes' imagination. It argues that Hughes' imaginative world was deeply mythic, in the sense of both drawing on the body of myth we have inherited and spontaneously creating new myths, or new expressions of the primal myths. It describes some of the more common and central paradigms in relation to Hughes, including the Goddess, the hero as criminal, and going naked.Less
This chapter focuses on the mythic nature of Hughes' imagination. It argues that Hughes' imaginative world was deeply mythic, in the sense of both drawing on the body of myth we have inherited and spontaneously creating new myths, or new expressions of the primal myths. It describes some of the more common and central paradigms in relation to Hughes, including the Goddess, the hero as criminal, and going naked.
Adam Piette
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748635276
- eISBN:
- 9780748651771
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic ...
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This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring Cold War fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period. It looks at leading Anglo-American writers in terms of the Cold War as a psychological and fantasy phenomenon. It provides significant readings of key post-war writers.Less
This book is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. It examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring Cold War fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period. It looks at leading Anglo-American writers in terms of the Cold War as a psychological and fantasy phenomenon. It provides significant readings of key post-war writers.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310119.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes Hughes' literary journey starting from the first lines of the first poem in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain to the last lines of his last poem in his 1982 Selected Poems. ...
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This chapter analyzes Hughes' literary journey starting from the first lines of the first poem in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain to the last lines of his last poem in his 1982 Selected Poems. It suggests that despite his deep early involvement with the natural world, Hughes was never in much danger of being remade in the image of Wordsworth.Less
This chapter analyzes Hughes' literary journey starting from the first lines of the first poem in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain to the last lines of his last poem in his 1982 Selected Poems. It suggests that despite his deep early involvement with the natural world, Hughes was never in much danger of being remade in the image of Wordsworth.
John Holmes
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639403
- eISBN:
- 9780748652174
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639403.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter focuses on three types of animal that have played particular symbolic roles in poetry since Charles Darwin. In birds of prey, Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Richard Eberhart and others ...
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This chapter focuses on three types of animal that have played particular symbolic roles in poetry since Charles Darwin. In birds of prey, Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Richard Eberhart and others have discerned a symbol of the deliberate violence of nature after Darwin. Through songbirds, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost and Amy Clampitt have articulated post-Romantic Darwinian visions of nature to set against Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ and John Keats' ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Through encounters with deer, Hardy, Frost and others have explored the divide between humans and wild animals and the yearning to cross it. Eberhart gives the impression of time as a perspective in his poem. Like Millay, Frost is less ready than Meredith or even Hardy to believe that there is really scope for the barrier between humans and other animals to be broken down.Less
This chapter focuses on three types of animal that have played particular symbolic roles in poetry since Charles Darwin. In birds of prey, Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Richard Eberhart and others have discerned a symbol of the deliberate violence of nature after Darwin. Through songbirds, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost and Amy Clampitt have articulated post-Romantic Darwinian visions of nature to set against Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ and John Keats' ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Through encounters with deer, Hardy, Frost and others have explored the divide between humans and wild animals and the yearning to cross it. Eberhart gives the impression of time as a perspective in his poem. Like Millay, Frost is less ready than Meredith or even Hardy to believe that there is really scope for the barrier between humans and other animals to be broken down.
Jonathan Ellis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last ...
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This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last letter’ to aesthetic and theoretical debates about the permanence of art over life, mind over matter, writing over speech. The chapter also addresses the elegiac strain in late twentieth-century letter writing, the sense among many poets that they are the very last letter writers.Less
This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last letter’ to aesthetic and theoretical debates about the permanence of art over life, mind over matter, writing over speech. The chapter also addresses the elegiac strain in late twentieth-century letter writing, the sense among many poets that they are the very last letter writers.
Marchella Ward
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198804215
- eISBN:
- 9780191842412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198804215.003.0007
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
That Ovid’s long hexameter poem, the Metamorphoses, defies the boundaries of genre has become axiomatic in classical scholarship and the genre of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, in particular, is ...
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That Ovid’s long hexameter poem, the Metamorphoses, defies the boundaries of genre has become axiomatic in classical scholarship and the genre of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, in particular, is difficult, since it contains within it the oriental novel, hexameter epic, and comedy, and moves between the elegiac city and the forest of tragedy. This chapter reads the tale as a parable of genre, exposing the invitations to performance latent in the text and examining the reception of this generic multiplicity in Shakespeare’s staged version at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The problem of genre in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ was as apparent to Shakespeare as it is to his Theseus and Philostrate. The tale’s life in drama continues into the twenty-first century, with Supple and Reade taking their cue from Shakespeare and responding to Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid by dramatizing elements from the collection.Less
That Ovid’s long hexameter poem, the Metamorphoses, defies the boundaries of genre has become axiomatic in classical scholarship and the genre of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, in particular, is difficult, since it contains within it the oriental novel, hexameter epic, and comedy, and moves between the elegiac city and the forest of tragedy. This chapter reads the tale as a parable of genre, exposing the invitations to performance latent in the text and examining the reception of this generic multiplicity in Shakespeare’s staged version at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The problem of genre in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ was as apparent to Shakespeare as it is to his Theseus and Philostrate. The tale’s life in drama continues into the twenty-first century, with Supple and Reade taking their cue from Shakespeare and responding to Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid by dramatizing elements from the collection.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310119.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes the poem, ‘The Dove Came’. It considers the various sources upon which Hughes draws upon as he writes the poem. Hughes struggles to let the dove force herself through all the ...
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This chapter analyzes the poem, ‘The Dove Came’. It considers the various sources upon which Hughes draws upon as he writes the poem. Hughes struggles to let the dove force herself through all the opposition, most of which comes from Adam (Hughes, everyman, reader) himself.Less
This chapter analyzes the poem, ‘The Dove Came’. It considers the various sources upon which Hughes draws upon as he writes the poem. Hughes struggles to let the dove force herself through all the opposition, most of which comes from Adam (Hughes, everyman, reader) himself.
Eleftheria Ioannidou
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199664115
- eISBN:
- 9780191833380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664115.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The fourth chapter discusses hybrid plays that unsettle the distinction between translation and adaptation. The chapter relates this mode of rewriting to the idea of the death of the Author, coined ...
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The fourth chapter discusses hybrid plays that unsettle the distinction between translation and adaptation. The chapter relates this mode of rewriting to the idea of the death of the Author, coined by Roland Barthes in the late 1960s. Ted Hughes’s Alcestis and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles adapt the figure of Heracles to contemplate the demise of the male hero via a translational practice that embodies the demise of the male Author. In Brendan Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy, the same practice is adopted to voice the silenced female stories. In Wole Soyinka’s postcolonial adaptation The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, the end of the authorial patriarchy entails the cultural fluidity of the classical canon.Less
The fourth chapter discusses hybrid plays that unsettle the distinction between translation and adaptation. The chapter relates this mode of rewriting to the idea of the death of the Author, coined by Roland Barthes in the late 1960s. Ted Hughes’s Alcestis and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles adapt the figure of Heracles to contemplate the demise of the male hero via a translational practice that embodies the demise of the male Author. In Brendan Kennelly’s versions of Greek tragedy, the same practice is adopted to voice the silenced female stories. In Wole Soyinka’s postcolonial adaptation The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, the end of the authorial patriarchy entails the cultural fluidity of the classical canon.
Stephen Mulhall
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199661787
- eISBN:
- 9780191748301
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199661787.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind
In a recent exchange of essays between Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, both found reason to take philosophical pleasure as well as philosophical instruction from J. M. Coetzee's decision to deliver ...
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In a recent exchange of essays between Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, both found reason to take philosophical pleasure as well as philosophical instruction from J. M. Coetzee's decision to deliver his Tanner lectures in the form of fictional tales devoted to the celebratory occasion on which Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello delivered the Gates Lecture at Appleton College. This chapter attempts to provide an additional layer of complexity to the portrait of Elizabeth Costello by considering a suggestion that prompted by Diamond's original essay, which paired Coetzee's Costello with Ted Hughes' poem ‘Six Young Men’ as her two leading examples of what it might mean to encounter a difficulty of reality.Less
In a recent exchange of essays between Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, both found reason to take philosophical pleasure as well as philosophical instruction from J. M. Coetzee's decision to deliver his Tanner lectures in the form of fictional tales devoted to the celebratory occasion on which Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello delivered the Gates Lecture at Appleton College. This chapter attempts to provide an additional layer of complexity to the portrait of Elizabeth Costello by considering a suggestion that prompted by Diamond's original essay, which paired Coetzee's Costello with Ted Hughes' poem ‘Six Young Men’ as her two leading examples of what it might mean to encounter a difficulty of reality.
Helen Slaney
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198736769
- eISBN:
- 9780191800412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198736769.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
In the generation after Artaud, many directors attempted to put the maxims of Cruelty into practice. These included Jean-Louis Barrault, who applied Artaud’s ideas to a 1942 production of Racine’s ...
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In the generation after Artaud, many directors attempted to put the maxims of Cruelty into practice. These included Jean-Louis Barrault, who applied Artaud’s ideas to a 1942 production of Racine’s Phèdre. Whereas Artaud had eschewed formal speech, Barrault returned to Racine’s poetry with a new sense of its musicality. His protégé Jorge Lavelli did the same with a translation of Seneca’s Medea some twenty years later. At the same time, Peter Brook was applying the principles of Cruelty to Seneca’s Oedipus. But while Seneca was experiencing something of a revival in the theatre industry, academic consensus (still under the sway of Schlegel) was of the opinion that Seneca’s plays could not be staged. The most prominent exponent of this position was Otto Zwierlein in Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas, whose detailed analysis of Seneca’s ‘flaws’ as a dramatist was predicated entirely on outdated assumptions of stage naturalism.Less
In the generation after Artaud, many directors attempted to put the maxims of Cruelty into practice. These included Jean-Louis Barrault, who applied Artaud’s ideas to a 1942 production of Racine’s Phèdre. Whereas Artaud had eschewed formal speech, Barrault returned to Racine’s poetry with a new sense of its musicality. His protégé Jorge Lavelli did the same with a translation of Seneca’s Medea some twenty years later. At the same time, Peter Brook was applying the principles of Cruelty to Seneca’s Oedipus. But while Seneca was experiencing something of a revival in the theatre industry, academic consensus (still under the sway of Schlegel) was of the opinion that Seneca’s plays could not be staged. The most prominent exponent of this position was Otto Zwierlein in Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas, whose detailed analysis of Seneca’s ‘flaws’ as a dramatist was predicated entirely on outdated assumptions of stage naturalism.
