Ted Hughes Contemporary Literature in English

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Ted HughesContemporary Literature in English

• Natália Pikli
• Department of English Studies
• ELTE

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Ted Hughes (1930-1998)Edward James Hughes,
Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire Poet Laureate 1984-89
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Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (1956-1963)(Birthda
y Letters, 1989)

• Yorkshire country childhood nature and myth,
  memories of war and masculinity
• Cambridge literature ? anthropology, archeology
• St. Botolphs 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 Plaths Ariel
  1966
• Wodwo, 1967
• 1969 suicide of Assia Wevill dark violence of
  Crow 1970

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• HUGHESs 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 daffodils were to
  Wordsworth
• For Hughes Nature is the main inspiration 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
  humanitys fall into scientific rationality/into
  an alienation from the organic world modern
  man narrowing his vision

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• 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 mediator, uniting two worlds
  (shaman)

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• 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.

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• The Thought-Fox
• I imagine this midnight moments forest
• Something else is alive
• Beside the clocks loneliness
• And this blank page where my fingers move.
•  
• Through the window I see no star
• Something more near
• Though deeper within darkness
• Is entering the loneliness
•  
• Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
• A foxs 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.

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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?

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Animals predatory instincts Relic and Pike
Tennyson natures red in tooth and claw

• Relic a jawbone found at the seas 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.)

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Relic

• I found this jawbone at the sea's edge There,
  crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
  To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
  Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold In
  that darkness camaraderie does not hold.
  Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And
  the jaws, Before they are satisfied or their
  stretched purpose Slacken, go down jaws go
  gnawn bare. Jaws Eat and are finished and the
  jawbone comes to the beach This is the sea's
  achievement with shells, Vertebrae, claws,
  carapaces, skulls. Time in the sea eats its
  tail, thrives, casts these Indigestibles, the
  spars of purposes That failed far from the
  surface. None grow rich In the sea. This curved
  jawbone did not laugh But gripped, gripped and
  is now a cenotaph.

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Pike 1. description

• Pike, three inches long, perfect Pike in all
  parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the
  egg the malevolent aged grin. They dance on the
  surface among the flies. Or move, stunned by
  their own grandeur, Over a bed of emerald,
  silhouette Of submarine delicacy and horror. A
  hundred feet long in their world. In ponds,
  under the heat-struck lily pads- Gloom of their
  stillness Logged on last year's black leaves,
  watching upwards. Or hung in an amber cavern of
  weeds The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to
  be changed at this date A life subdued to its
  instrument The gills kneading quietly, and the
  pectorals.

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Pike 2. childhood memory/home

• Three we kept behind glass, Jungled in weed
  three inches, four, And four and a half red fry
  to them- Suddenly there were two. Finally one
  With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
  And indeed they spare nobody. Two, six pounds
  each, over two feet long High and dry and dead
  in the willow-herb- One jammed past its gills
  down the other's gullet The outside eye stared
  as a vice locks-
• The same iron in this eye Though its film shrank
  in death.

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Pike 3. childhood memory/nature/cultural memory/

• A pond I fished, fifty yards across, Whose
  lilies and muscular tench Had outlasted every
  visible stone Of the monastery that planted
  them- Stilled legendary depth It was as deep
  as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so
  immense and old That past nightfall I dared not
  cast But silently cast and fished With the
  hair frozen on my head For what might move, for
  what eye might move. The still splashes on the
  dark pond, Owls hushing the floating woods
  Frail on my ear against the dream Darkness
  beneath night's darkness had freed, That rose
  slowly toward me, watching.

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Wodwo

• What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
• Following a faint stain on the air to the river's
  edge
• I enter water. Who am I to split
• The glassy grain of water looking upward I see
  the bed
• Of the river above me upside down very clear
• What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
• this frog so interesting as I inspect its most
  secret
• interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
• know me and name me to each other have they
• seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
• separate from the ground and not rooted but
  dropped
• out of nothing casually I've no threads
• fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
• I seem to have been given the freedom
• of this place what am I then? And picking
• bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
• no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
• me and doing that have coincided very queerly

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Wodwo

• But what shall I be called am I the first
• have I an owner what shape am I what
• shape am I am I huge if I go
• to the end on this way past these trees and past
  these trees
• till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
• for the moment if I sit still how everything
• stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
• but there's all this what is it roots
• roots roots roots and here's the water
• again very queer but I'll go on looking

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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 - Ill go
  on looking.
• free-flowing verse with repetitions uncertainty
• (Wodwo, 1967)

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Crow, 1970 (1972) Leonard Baskin- drawings

• a sequence of loosely related short poems,
• addressing ultimate religious questions
• a narrative God vs Crow, games
• an antagonist Bible (sometimes Gnostic),
• a myth that parallels and denies the biblical
• answers survival and egoism
• a creation myth, or rather a creation-and-destruct
  ion myth, influenced by oral poetry, mystic
  incantations and spells, closely drawing on the
  trickster myths of North Americas 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)

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• Examination at the Womb-door
• Who owns those scrawny little feet?    Death.
  Who owns this bristly scorched-looking
  face?    Death. Who owns these still-working
  lungs?    Death. Who owns this utility coat of
  muscles?    Death. Who owns these unspeakable
  guts?    Death. Who owns these questionable
  brains?    Death. All this messy
  blood?    Death. These minimum-efficiency
  eyes?    Death. This wicked little
  tongue?    Death. This occasional
  wakefulness?    Death. Given, stolen, or held
  pending trial? Held. Who owns the whole rainy,
  stony earth?    Death. Who owns all of
  space?    Death. Who is stronger than
  hope?    Death. Who is stronger than the
  will?    Death. Stronger than love?    Death.
  Stronger than life?    Death. But who is
  stronger than Death?                            M
  e, evidently. Pass, Crow.

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Crow

• primerlike vocabulary, simple syntax
  (unsubordinated sentences), impersonal point of
  view
• Admiration of brutish strength, of unyielding
  energy and survival of the fittest
• Crow swallowing up everything words,
  meaningful philosophies
• crows-found everywhere (folktales, myths)
• Ted Hughes Crow is the undestructible bird,
  who, suffering everything, suffers nothing like
  Horatio
• (https//www.youtube.com/watch?vVXYMNDu-qxo)

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Crows Theology

• Crow realized God loved him
• Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
• So that was proved.
• Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
•  
• And he realized that God spoke Crow
• Just existing was His revelation.
•  

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• But what
• Loved the stones and spoke stone?
• They seemed to exist too.
• And what spoke that strange silence
• After his clamour of caws faded?
• And what loved the shot-pellets
• That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying
  crows?
• What spoke the silence of lead?
• Crow realized there were two Gods 
• One of them much bigger than the other
• Loving his enemies
• And having all the weapons.

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A Childish Prank

• 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.

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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 GodJesus 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!

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Agnus Dei Victoria and Albert Museum,
LondonStained glass panel, unknown artist, c.
1850
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February 17th (excerpts)

• A lamb could not get born. Ice wind
• Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother
• Lay on the muddied slope. Harried, she got up
• And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end
• Under her tail. After some hard galloping,
• Some manoeuvering, much flapping of the backward
• Lump head of the lamb looking out,
• I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill
• And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen
• Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap
• Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,
• Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,
• Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery
• Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,
• Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

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February 17th (excerpts)

• I roped that baby head
• And hauled till she cried out and tried
• To get up and I saw it was useless. I went
• Two miles for the injection and a razor.
• Sliced the lamb's throat-strings, levered with a
  knife
• Between the vertebrae and brought the head off
• To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the
  mud
• With all earth for a body. Then pushed
• The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed
• She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed
  gasping.
• And the strength
• Of the birth push and the push of my thumb
• Against that wobbly vertebrae were deadlock,
• A to-fro futility.

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February 17th (excerpts)

• Then like
• Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger
• Hooked in a loop, timing my effort
• To her birth push groans, I pulled against
• The corpse that would not come. Till it came,
• And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow
• Parcel of life
• In a smothering slither of oils and soups and
  syrups
• And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off
  head.
•  
• (17 February 1974)

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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.

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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
  others face)

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Lovesong (1970, Crow!)

• He loved her and she loved him. His kisses
  sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
  He had no other appetite She bit him she gnawed
  him she sucked She wanted him complete inside
  her Safe and sure forever and ever Their little
  cries fluttered into the curtains Her eyes
  wanted nothing to get away Her looks nailed down
  his hands his wrists his elbows He gripped her
  hard so that life Should not drag her from that
  moment He wanted all future to cease He wanted
  to topple with his arms round her Off that
  moment's brink and into nothing Or everlasting
  or whatever there was

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• Her embrace was an immense press To print him
  into her bones His smiles were the garrets of a
  fairy palace Where the real world would never
  come Her smiles were spider bites So he would
  lie still till she felt hungry His words were
  occupying armies Her laughs were an assassin's
  attempts His looks were bullets daggers of
  revenge His glances were ghosts in the corner
  with horrible secrets His whispers were whips
  and jackboots Her kisses were lawyers steadily
  writing His caresses were the last hooks of a
  castaway Her love-tricks were the grinding of
  locks And their deep cries crawled over the
  floors Like an animal dragging a great trap
  
  His
  promises were the surgeon's gag Her promises
  took the top off his skull She would get a
  brooch made of it His vows pulled out all her
  sinews He showed her how to make a love-knot
  Her vows put his eyes in formalin At the back
  of her secret drawer Their screams stuck in the
  wall

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• Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two
  halves Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to
  stop In their entwined sleep they exchanged
  arms and legs In their dreams their brains took
  each other hostage In the morning they wore
  each other's face

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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 its the need to keep it hidden that
  makes it poetic makes it poetry. The writer
  darent actually put it into words, so it leaks
  out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We
  think were writing something to amuse, but were
  actually saying something we desperately need to
  share.

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• 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

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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 hid. Your exaggerated American / Grin for
  the cameras, the judges, 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

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narrative/Greek tragedy/dialogue

• Otto Plath, the dead father Hughes the husband
  ghosts/Sylvias drama
• Your Paris You Hated Spain basic differences
  of vision, conscious vs unconscious (Spain
  frightened 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/Sylvias
  poems

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Ted Hughes poet, writer, playwright

• National Theatre, Peter Brook Orghast a play
  in an invented language, myth of Prometheus
• books for children (Iron Man, Moon-Whales)
• translating Pilinszky
• Ted Hughes Award funded by Carol Ann Duffy, the
  present Poet Laureate