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Fighting Back Over the Same Ground: Ted Hughes and War

Tim Kendall

in Modern English War Poetry

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 ... More

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

Collaboration: Canonical Hybridity, Ted Hughes, and Leonard Baskin

Natalie Pollard

in Poetry, Publishing, and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the Twenty-first Century: Fugitive Pieces

This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is ... More

This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is often considered central to the development of the English poetic canon, in his collaboration with the American artist and publisher Leonard Baskin in producing the 1973 book, Cave Birds. The trade volume initially contained over ten of Baskin’s pen-and-ink images (which had inspired Hughes to pen his poems). Why, then, are Baskin’s artworks no longer published alongside Hughes’s poems? This chapter puts drawing and text back into dialogue, offering a sustained intra-artistic reading of an image-poem pair as it resonates with the vision of Michelangelo, Michael Ayrton, Giacometti, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. Artwork and literary text interact before our viewing-reading eyes, performing an eloquent expression of the complexity of aesthetic co-constitution, across media and history.Less

Literary Contexts

Luke Ferretter

in Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study

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 ... More

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

Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry in the Mid to Late 1950s

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

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 ... More

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

Birthday Letters

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

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, ... More

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

Introduction: ‘Original Response’

Michael O'Neill

in The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

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 ... More

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

Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry in the Mid to Late 1950s

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

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 ... More

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

Birthday Letters

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

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, ... More

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

From Prospero to Orpheus

in The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

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 ... More

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

The Mythic Imagination

in The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

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 ... More

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

Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes

Rand Brandes

in Writing Modern Ireland

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 ... More

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

Humans and Other Animals

John Holmes

in Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution

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 ... More

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

From World of Blood to World of Light

in The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

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. ... More

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

Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

in A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

This chapter attends to modernism’s obsession with the question of life’s meaning that shows forth in Woolf’s writing in the expressions of a longing for out-of-reach answers to the perennial ... More

This chapter attends to modernism’s obsession with the question of life’s meaning that shows forth in Woolf’s writing in the expressions of a longing for out-of-reach answers to the perennial existential questions ‘why?’ that pervade the world of her novels. It focuses specifically on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the novel in which such questions arise with greatest urgency. Woolf’s fixation on questions, quests, and the yearning for a revised understanding of life offers a way of coping with the specific category of “different-order” difficulty that Diamond calls “the difficulty of reality,” and describes as the experience of an ordinary sublime so terrible or astonishing that it resists our very capacities of thought. Diamond’s account of this weighty order of difficulty creates a new philosophical context in which to understand Woolf’s treatment of the difficulties of life. Reading Woolf with reference to Diamond shows how matters at the heart of Woolf’s novel intersect with Wittgensteinian and Cavellian preoccupations that inform Diamond’s own thinking about literature and moral philosophy. Making connections among Wittgenstein’s, Diamond’s, and Woolf’s treatments of these issues brings into clearer focus the philosophical sympathies that attest to the mutual significance of their particular brands of modernism.Less

Last Letters: Keats, Bishop and Hughes

Jonathan Ellis

in Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop

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 ... More

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

‘I am that same wall; the truth is so’: Performing a Tale from Ovid

Marchella Ward

in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

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 ... More

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

The Evolution of ‘The Dove Came’

in The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

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 ... More

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