Ted Hughes : New Selected Poems 9781847600318, 9781847600707

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Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

Ted Hughes New Selected Poems Neil Roberts

‘…the life we share with other creatures … the realm of the sacred…’ For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

Publication Data © Neil Roberts, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-031-8

Ted Hughes: ‘New Selected Poems’ Neil Roberts

Bibliographical Entry: Roberts, Neil. Ted Hughes: ‘New Selected Poems’. Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

Contents A Note on the Author Part 1: The context of New Selected Poems 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

General Introduction Hughes’s early life Early writing Cambridge and the Burnt Fox Sylvia Plath Crow and more tragedy Persecution The Poet Laureate

Part 2: Artistic strategies and influences 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

‘Dialect’ Shakespeare, Romantics and Moderns The White Goddess The influence of Sylvia Plath Shamanism East European Poetry Trickster Mythology Confessional poetry

Part 3: Reading New Selected Poems 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

The Hawk in the Rain Lupercal Wodwo Crow

Ted Hughes  

3.5 Cave Birds 3.6 Season Songs 3.7 Gaudete 3.8 Remains of Elmet 3.9 Moortown Diary 3.10 River 3.11 Wolfwatching 3.12 Uncollected Poems Part 4: Reception Part 5: Bibliography 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Works by Ted Hughes Web Sites Criticism and Biography Other Works

Part 6: Appendices Appendix 1: Wodwo Appendix 2: Vacanas

A Note on the Author Neil Roberts studied English at the University of Cambridge where he took an MA and PhD. Since 1970 he has taught at the University of Sheffield, where he is Professor of English Literature. He is the author of George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (Elek, 1975), Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (with Terry Gifford, Faber, 1981), The Lover, the Dreamer and the World: the Poetry of Peter Redgrove (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), Meredith and the Novel (Macmillan, 1997), Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (Longman, 1999), D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (Palgrave, 2004) Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006), and D. H. Lawrence: ‘Women in Love’ (Literature Insights, 2007). He is the editor of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Blackwell, 2001) and of The Colour of Radio: Essays and Interviews by Peter Redgrove (Stride, 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Peter Redgrove.

Part 1: The context of New Selected Poems 1.1 General Introduction

For the last fourteen years of his life Ted Hughes was Poet Laureate, and his poetry is in many ways fairly traditional. It is therefore easy to regard him as an establishment figure. But in a profound way Hughes was strongly anti-establishment. He began his career as a poet in the post-war years when the most powerful current in western societies was a materialistic belief in progress driven by the exploitative domination of nature. By contrast Hughes’s life and work were centred on a deep and religious attachment to the natural world, and a belief that the real self of a human being is not the rational intellect but the life we share with other creatures. This, to him, was the realm of the sacred, with which he believed western civilisation had disastrously lost contact. Like the Latin poet Ovid, as he put it in his introduction to his book Tales from Ovid, Hughes lived in an age in which ‘the obsolete paraphernalia of the official religion were lying in heaps ... and new ones had not yet arrived ... The mythic plane, so to speak, had been defrocked.’ Hughes’s response was to draw eclectically on a wide range of myths and anti-rational discourses, as a way of resisting the hegemony of rationalistic materialism and keeping faith with what to him was the inner life. The poetry that resulted from this endeavour, over a period of nearly half a century, was bold in its imaginative scope, often visceral in its imagery, varied in its technical and generic devices, energetic in its sound and rhythms. The highlights of New Selected Poems range from the animal poems that made him famous to mythological sequences, poems for children, down-to-earth farming poems and, at the end of his life, haunting elegies for his first wife Sylvia Plath. New Selected Poems was published in 1995, three years before Hughes’s death, and at a low point in his critical reputation. It was the last and largest of  Tales from Ovid, pp. x–xi

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four selections of his work, beginning with a joint Selected Poems with Thom Gunn in 1962. Most readers would have considered at the time that Hughes would do little more to change public perception of his work. However, in the last two years of his life he published two volumes which did just that. These were Tales from Ovid, a collection of loose translations from the Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Birthday Letters, a collection of elegies for his poet wife Sylvia Plath, who had committed suicide in 1963. Tales from Ovid (1997) showed evidence of a renewed poetic vitality and was treated as an original work despite its reliance on the Latin original. Birthday Letters (1998) had a far more profound effect on perceptions of Hughes not only as a poet but as a man: the book led to a revaluation of his relationship with Plath; it also showed him practising a directly autobiographical kind of poetry that he had previously despised. Few readers had noticed that eight of these poems had already been published in the ‘Uncollected’ section of New Selected Poems. For the most part New Selected Poems is a straightforward collection of the poems Hughes valued most highly in the various books that he published throughout his career. It does have a few peculiarities, however, which a reader not already familiar with his work might not notice. It opens with ‘The ThoughtFox’ from his first volume The Hawk in the Rain (1957). But this was not originally the first poem in that volume. By moving it to the front Hughes signals that it has a special importance, as the gateway to the world of his poetry. More dramatically, he concludes the volume with the poem ‘A Dove’, which is chronologically displaced from the volume in which it was originally published, Wolfwatching (1988) and listed in isolation in the Contents: an even stronger indication that this poem is specially significant for its author. Throughout his life Hughes wrote for children as well as for adults, and published altogether ten volumes of children’s poetry. Sometimes the boundary between poetry for children and for adults was blurred. Two of the volumes from which he selects poems in New Selected—Season Songs and What is the Truth?—were published as children’s books. A Selected Poems gives its author a chance to revise his opinion of his earlier work. The section titled ‘Recklings’ consists of poems that Hughes originally rejected from his collection Wodwo (1967) (see Appendix 1): here he leaves out some of the Wodwo poems and includes these instead.

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An author’s selection of his own poems is, then, of interest in itself, but of course the most important contexts of these poems are those in which they were originally written, and that is what the rest of this section will concentrate on. 1.2 Hughes’s early life

Hughes was born in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, a small mill town in the depths of a valley between a precipitous rocky edge and a more gradual climb to moorland. It was a region that had lost many men to the First World War: those losses, and the traumatic memories of the men like Hughes’s father who returned, added a human dimension to the gloom of the valley. All these aspects—the declining industrial landscape, the weight of tragic history, and the high, free, wild landscape above the town—contributed profoundly to forming Hughes’s imagination. He has described the feeling of being ‘trapped’ in the valley, and the great events of his childhood were his expeditions on the moors with his much older brother Gerald: Gerald was passionate about shooting animals, and the young Ted would act as his retriever. The return to the valley from these expeditions was ‘a descent into the pit, and after each visit I must have returned less and less of myself into the valley.’ The main element of this feeling was the contrast between the wild freedom of the natural world and the constraints of urban domestic life, but at least in retrospect an important aspect was ‘the impression that the whole region is in mourning for the First World War.’ His father had fought at Gallipoli, and was one of only seventeen from his regiment who came back. His reaction to his ordeal was a traumatised silence, broken by cries in his sleep at night. Again and again, throughout his career, Hughes returns to the First World War and the figure of his traumatised father. But the most deeply influential early experiences were his escapes with his brother: experiences that he described as ‘paradise’. He did not use that word lightly. These expeditions were not merely fun days out for the little boy, but formative spiritual experiences leading to a lifelong belief that his truest, deepest self belonged in that landscape and with the wild animals there—and that urban civilisation was a prison. It is a paradox that Gerald was killing the birds  Ted Hughes, ‘The Rock’, The Listener, 70, pp. 421–3, 19 September 1963  Quoted in Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, Armidale New South Wales, University of New England Press, 1994, p. 176

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and animals with which Ted felt this kinship. Although the paradox troubled him from time to time, he believed that the activity of hunting gives one a vital connection with the hunted animal, a retrieval of the lost instincts of primitive man. Later in life he was a passionate fisherman, and said about this activity: ‘It’s an extension of your whole organism into the whole environment that created you .... If I were deprived of that kind of live, intimate, interactive existence ... it would be as though I’d had some great, vital part of me amputated’. The life in Mytholmroyd, and the adventures with Gerald, lasted only till Hughes was seven years old. Then the family moved to Mexborough, a mining town in South Yorkshire, and Gerald left home, first to be a gamekeeper in Devon, then in the RAF during the war, finally emigrating to Australia. The effect of this separation on Ted can be judged from the fact that he told Gerald he had felt orphaned by his brother’s emigration. Nevertheless, he carried on his communion with nature as best he could, exploring the countryside around his new home. In his poetry primer for young people, Poetry in the Making, he traces a continuity between literally capturing animals and imaginatively capturing a living reality in poetry, so that his poetry was ‘partly a continuation of my earlier pursuit.’ He offers ‘The Thought-Fox’ as his prime example. In another chapter of Poetry in the Making, titled ‘Learning to Think’, he compares creative thinking to fishing: ‘the whole purpose of this concentrated excitement, in this arena of apprehension and unforeseeable events, is to bring up some lovely solid thing, like living metal, from a world where nothing exists but those inevitable facts which raise life out of nothing and return it to nothing.’ As an adult Hughes believed that modern life alienates us from ‘those inevitable facts’, from the lives of animals, and from our own life as animals, which he once called ‘the redeemed life of joy’. His early life with Gerald, and its abrupt ending, thus became a template for a vision of life as ‘paradise lost’.

 ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Thomas Pero, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Vol.5 no.2, Winter 1999, p. 56  Letter to Gerald Hughes, 21 December 1979, Emory University, Atlanta  Poetry in the Making, p. 61  ‘Desk Poet’, interview with John Horder, The Guardian, 23 March 1965

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1.3 Early writing

Hughes began writing poetry in his mid teens. His earliest efforts, which were published in his school magazine, are not in New Selected Poems but can be found in Collected Poems. His first influence was Rudyard Kipling, and he enjoyed writing adventure stories in what he called ‘Kipling’s lockstep rhythms and resounding deadlock rhymes’. Here is an example from his first published poem: I’ll tell you a tale of Carson McReared Who, south of the 49th was feared Greater than any man ever before, And men went in fear of his .44.

This is accomplished poetry for a fifteen-year-old, but completely lacking in inwardness. As Hughes’s reading widened, he discovered the poetry of W. B. Yeats, especially The Wanderings of Oisin, and T. S. Eliot, and became captivated by their ‘wilder and more hauntingly varied’ rhythms. Soon he was writing like this: O lean dry man with your thin withered feet, Feet like old rain-worn weasels, like old roots Frost-warped and shrunken on the cold sea beach, You have a sad world here: Only the bitter windy rain and bareness of wet rock glistening; Only the sand-choked marram, only their dead Throats whispering always in despair: only the wild high phantomdrifting of the gulls ....

The subject matter is more mature and personal, the rhythm is infinitely more subtle, the imagery, especially the ‘Feet like old rain-worn weasels’ sharp and original: this is evidence of a remarkable young talent, and is good enough to have been included in Hughes’s first collection.  Winter Pollen p. 5  ‘Wild West’, Collected Poems p. 3; first published in Don and Dearne, Mexborough Grammar School, 1946  Winter Pollen p. 6  ‘The Recluse’, Collected Poems p6; first published in Don and Dearne, 1948

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Hughes was encouraged in his poetic aspirations by his schoolteachers and by his sister Olwyn (two years older than himself), who later became his literary agent. A year after ‘The Recluse’ he wrote ‘Song’, the earliest of his poems to be collected in The Hawk in the Rain. However, there was to be a five-year gap before the next poem that he considered worthy of preservation. 1.4 Cambridge and the Burnt Fox

Hughes was a successful student and won an Exhibition (a minor scholarship) to study English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. First he had to complete eighteen months’ military service, where he managed to do a lot of reading including, he claimed, the whole of Shakespeare. He finally took up his place at Cambridge in October 1951. The dominant figure in the Cambridge poetry scene at that time was Thom Gunn, a year senior to Hughes. However, although Faber subsequently linked their similarly bluff names for publicity purposes, and published a joint Selected Poems, Hughes did not associate with Gunn at Cambridge and published no poetry while he was an undergraduate. He later described this period as ‘the years of devastation’ and ‘total confusion’, brought about by the conflict he experienced between the academic study of literature and poetic creativity. Not every budding poet at Cambridge felt this conflict. Thom Gunn enthusiastically embraced the academic critical environment and Peter Redgrove, who was a science student, abandoned his formal studies and started attending English lectures. Moreover, the poetry that was later to make Hughes famous conformed in many ways to the norms of Cambridge English at the time. However, he believed that, although he had a facility for it, literary criticism had a destructive effect on his psyche, and his unhappiness culminated in a devastatingly memorable dream. Towards the end of his second year at Cambridge he was struggling to complete the weekly essay that is required of undergraduates. He sat up late at night, unable to write anything. Eventually he went to bed, leaving the essay uncompleted on his desk. That night he dreamed that he was back at his desk, working on the essay, when the door opened and a strange creature entered the  Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: the Life of a Poet, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001, p. 20  Letter to Leonard Scigaj, 28 July 1989, Emory University

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room. This creature was a large, almost human-sized fox, walking on its hind legs like a man. But the most striking thing about it was that it was burnt all over. It came across the room and laid a hand on his essay—it had human hands instead of paws—and said ‘Stop this—you are destroying us’. When it removed the hand, a bloody print was left on the essay. Hughes abandoned the study of English, and changed to Archaeology and Anthropology. This was not an unusual move, and the Cambridge degree was designed to enable students to change in this way. But it was a significant change, because the religions and mythologies of other cultures were to have an important influence on his poetry. In conventional academic terms Hughes paid a heavy price for his abandonment of English—at the end of his second year he gained an Upper Second class degree in that subject, while his final degree class in Archaeology and Anthropology was only a Third. But he never regretted the change. 1.5 Sylvia Plath

After graduating Hughes lived in London. He was determined to devote his life to poetry but did little to create a literary career for himself. In the month of his graduation, June 1954, he published his first poem in four years, in the student magazine Granta. This was a minor poem that he subsequently rejected; later that year, in another student magazine, he published ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘The Casualty’, the first of the New Selected Poems to appear in public. In London he took various jobs, ranging from dishwashing at Regents Park Zoo to reading scripts for J. Arthur Rank, film producers. His most settled plan at this time was to join his brother in Australia. He had a girlfriend in Cambridge, and a number of poet-friends, and he revisited the university frequently. With a group of friends he published a new poetry magazine, St Botolph’s Review, with four of his poems, including ‘Soliloquy’ and ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’. They held a party to launch the magazine and it was here that the fateful meeting of Hughes and Sylvia Plath took place in February 1956. Plath was an American student on the first year of a two-year scholarship to Cambridge. She was a gifted and ambitious writer who, unlike Hughes,  ‘The Burnt Fox’, Winter Pollen, pp. 8–9

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had assiduously pursued a literary career. Since the age of seventeen she had published, and been paid for, numerous poems, stories and articles in national magazines. Paradoxically, while Hughes had published only a handful of poems in school and student magazines, six of those poems would be included in his first collection, whereas it was to be several years before Plath wrote any of the poems that were to make her famous. Within four months of meeting they married, and Hughes returned to Cambridge to live with Plath while she completed her degree. She took the same professional approach to his work as to her own, and soon his poems were appearing in major journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Most momentously, Plath gathered together a collection of his poems and submitted it to a competition that was judged by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore. Hughes won the competition and in September 1957 The Hawk in the Rain was published by Faber and Faber, the most prestigious British poetry publisher whose list included T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. The dominant mode of poetry practised in England in the mid-1950s was that of the loosely associated group of poets known as the Movement. ‘Movement’ poetry was characterised by respect for form, a social and rational tone, and a rejection both of Modernist experimentation and of Romantic sublimity. Thom Gunn was associated with the Movement, mainly because of his mastery of conventional form, but by far the most celebrated and gifted mainstream ‘Movement’ poet was Philip Larkin. Hughes thought of these poets as a wartime generation who had ‘had enough ... rhetoric, enough overweening push of any kind, enough of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough of the Angelic powers and the heroic efforts to make new worlds.’ He, coming a little later, ‘hadn’t had enough [and] was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there.’ The turn away from social contexts in Hughes’s early poetry, the imaginative response to nature and above all predatory animals, and what was sometimes seen as a celebration of violence, all marked him out as a departure from the ‘Movement’ norm, though his first book was not, as retrospective accounts sometimes suggest, received as a wild beast rampaging through the libraries. The Hawk in the Rain was well reviewed (see Section 4) on both sides of the Atlantic, and by the time  Interview with Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press, 1980, p. 201

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it was published Hughes had travelled with Plath to America so that she could take up a teaching post at her alma mater, Smith University in Northampton, Massachussetts. They stayed in America for over two years, moving to Boston in 1958. Hughes disliked and felt uninspired by America, “where everything was ‘in cellophane’”. Perhaps if he had lived in some part other than genteel New England he might have felt differently. While living in America he wrote nearly all the poems in his second collection, Lupercal (1960). The country in which he was living makes no impression whatever on these poems. The volume includes some of Hughes’s most famous evocations of the natural world: ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Pike’, ‘The Bull Moses’, ‘An Otter’, ‘Pennines in April’. It is startling to realise that in these vivid poems Hughes was not writing about what was in front of him, but about a remembered and internalised world. The scenes and animals of Lupercal represent an inner resource to which Hughes withdrew from the uncongenial environment in which he was living. They are psychological and spiritual realities as much as physical ones. This is true of all his work; it happens that the circumstances of Lupercal’s composition make it especially obvious. By the time Lupercal was published Hughes and Plath were back in England, living in London, and expecting their first child. The second collection was even more enthusiastically received than the first (See Section 4) and Hughes’s literary career had far outstripped his wife’s. Plath’s first volume, The Colossus, was published in the same year, to a comparatively muted reception. The couple strove to combine a shared writing life with a family, but the marriage suffered a number of strains. Plath’s history of psychiatric illness, and her earlier suicide attempt, were a constant shadow; she was subject to periodic fits of jealous rage; and, while Hughes believed that Plath was a genius and his poetic soul-mate, domesticity conflicted with his spiritual attachment to the ‘redeemed life’ of the natural world. Much later, writing about this time in Birthday Letters, he narrates an episode in which a young man in the street offers him a fox cub. He refuses, thinking of the impossibility of taking the ‘mannerless energy’ and ‘vast hunger for everything beyond us’ back to ‘our crate of space’ with the baby. The poem concludes,  Letter to Olwyn Hughes, 22 August 1957, Letters of Ted Hughes, p106.

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If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage— I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it? But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

This is not the stale narrative of unruly masculinity rebelling against female domesticity. What first attracted Plath to Hughes was precisely what makes him contemplate bringing a fox-cub home: she called him a ‘lion and worldwanderer, a vagabond who will never stop’ with ‘pockets full of poems, fresh trout and horoscopes’. When, the day after meeting him, she wrote a poem beginning, ‘There is a panther stalks me down’, the panther was not merely a romantic glamorisation of Hughes, but also represented her desire for him. As Diane Middlebrook has pointed out, Hughes compared Plath herself to a fox when trying to explain his feelings about episodes such as the one in which she destroyed his Shakespeare in a jealous rage: ‘It was like trying to protect a fox from my own hounds while the fox bit me’. A similar episode is narrated in the Birthday Letters poem, ‘The Minotaur’, when Plath smashes a table and Hughes exclaims, ‘That’s the stuff you’re keeping out of your poems!’ In other words, the ‘mannerless energy’ of the fox-cub is Plath’s as much as it is Hughes’s. The failure of their marriage might be that this energy got into her poems only after the marriage had ended. In 1961 the couple moved to a large old house in Devon. The small London flat had been a cause of stress, but the house was cold and needed a great deal of work. The birth of a second child, early in the following year, added to the strains in their relationship. Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill, the wife of the poet David Wevill: Plath found out and they parted. For Plath what followed was an explosive combination of anguish and triumph. She had been haunted all her life by her father’s death when she was eight years old; when she met Hughes she told her mother that he filled the gap left by her father; now she had been deserted again by the man she loved. Her pain and rage released one    

‘Epiphany’, Birthday Letters Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, London, Faber, 1975, pp. 233, 243–4 Sylvia Plath, ‘Pursuit’, Collected Poems Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, (1993) London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, p. 43, cited in Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, New York, Viking, 2003, p. 103

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of the most extraordinary periods of creativity ever recorded: in the weeks after they separated she wrote most of the poems that were later published in Ariel and Winter Trees, including ‘Daddy’ (explicitly inspired by the scenario I have just outlined), ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Purdah’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ and her sequence of bee poems. She moved with the children to a flat in London but in February 1963, in one of the coldest winters on record, she succumbed to depression and killed herself. Within a few weeks of Plath’s death Hughes wrote two poems which are directly though inexplicitly inspired by it: ‘Song of a Rat’ and ‘The Howling of Wolves’; then very little poetry for the next three years, when he began again with ‘Skylarks’. His third major volume, Wodwo, did not appear until seven years after Lupercal. It is an odd volume, divided into three parts, the second consisting of five stories and a radio play. There is an author’s note saying that the whole work should be considered as a ‘single adventure’. There is no trace of this structure in New Selected Poems, and the idea of the ‘single adventure’ is not helpful when reading the poems. However, it is very relevant to Hughes’s work as a whole, and to the way he regarded himself as a man and a poet. In a letter written at the time of the book’s publication he explained that ‘after an undisturbed relationship with the outside natural world’ he had received an ‘invitation or importuning of a subjective world’ which he refused and consequently suffered ‘a mental collapse into the condition of an animal.’ What Hughes meant by ‘a subjective world’ is idiosyncratic, and I shall be explaining it further in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. I suggest that his story about the offer of the baby fox, and his refusal of it, is an example of what he means. The ‘single adventure’, however vague in outline, is a template for much of Hughes’s work, from ‘The Thought-Fox’ to Birthday Letters. 1.6 Crow and more tragedy

The burst of creativity that began with the last poems in Wodwo continued for the next three years: as far as his writing was concerned, this was the happiest period of Hughes’s life. This may seem paradoxical, because many readers  Letter to Janos Csokits, 6 August 1967, Letters of Ted Hughes, pp. 273–74

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consider the work he was composing during this period, Crow, to be bleak and nihilistic. Crow marks a new phase in Hughes’s work in two ways. The work was originally inspired by drawings of crows by Hughes’s friend, the American artist Leonard Baskin. One of these was used on the dust jacket of the first edition. Baskin played no further part in the project, but in the seventies and eighties Hughes was several times to work collaboratively with visual artists, including Baskin himself. Also, from now onward, most of Hughes’s volumes of poetry will be themed and/or narrative sequences. His first three books (despite the ‘author’s note’ of Wodwo) were just collections of the best poems he had written in the previous few years. Of the remaining collections represented in New Selected Poems only Earth-Numb (itself originally published in a larger volume with several themed sequences) and Wolfwatching are of this kind. Hughes’s original plan for Crow was very ambitious. He wanted to write what he called a saga or epic folk-tale, based on the adventures of the central character Crow. The saga would be in prose, with poems interspersed. He never completed the saga, and his statements about it are contradictory. At times he has said that the prose narrative was only a way of getting at the poems, and is unimportant in itself; at other times throughout his life he avowed the intention of completing it. The surviving manuscripts are fragmentary and chaotic, and don’t promise any kind of coherent frame for the poems. The project might never have come to anything, but it was in any case disrupted by a second and even more terrible tragedy. After Plath’s death Hughes’s relationship with Assia continued, but was disrupted by the hostility of Hughes’s parents, who were now living with him because of their poor health. In 1967 they had a child, Shura. However, Hughes was seeing other women and Assia despaired of ever having the complete relationship with him that she desired. In March 1969 she killed herself and Shura. Soon afterwards Hughes’s mother died of a heart attack, he believed because of the shock of Assia and Shura’s deaths. This brought an almost complete end to the writing of Crow: only ‘The Lovepet’ was written after Assia’s death. He decided to publish a selection of the poems without the narrative: eventually an edition of sixty-eight poems was published as Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow; half of these are in New Selected Poems. The publication of this volume was probably the peak of Hughes’s celebrity and reputation:

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Crow was intensely controversial, but even critics who condemned it did so mostly by comparing it unfavourably with his earlier work. For Hughes personally, however, this was a period of depression and confusion. He threw himself into an extraordinary theatrical experiment, Orghast, with the theatre director Peter Brook, which involved the creation of a myth in an invented language. An offshoot of this project was the only significant poetic work he produced in the early 1970s, the sequence Prometheus on his Crag which he described as a ‘little myth of sinister import and total inner stasis’. 1.7 Persecution

After Assia Wevill’s death Hughes married Carol Orchard, the daughter of a farmer. In 1973 he bought a farm in Devon which he worked for several years with his father-in-law. This enterprise resulted directly in the sequence of poems titled Moortown Diary, which were written as diary entries without revision. In the same period he wrote Season Songs. Hughes had previously published several collections of poetry for young children; perhaps because his own children were now in their teens, Season Songs is aimed at an older age-group, and many of them can be read as adult poems: hence their inclusion in New Selected Poems. These sequences may seem like a retreat from the mythological and metaphysical ambitions of Crow to a more pastoral and lyrical mode (though some of Moortown Diary is very grim)—but at the same time he was continuing the project begun in Crow, with the ambitious works Gaudete and Cave Birds, which are very inadequately represented in New Selected Poems. During the 1970s Hughes’ reputation began to be overshadowed by the effects of a rising tide of interest in the life and death of Sylvia Plath. An American poet published a poem accusing him of her murder, and he had to endure heckling at public readings. A series of biographies appeared, which he felt to be a gross intrusion on his private life, especially when they represented his behaviour in lurid and prejudicial terms. Because he and Plath had still been married at her death he controlled her literary estate, and scholars started to be critical of the way he had published her posthumous work, especially her most famous book  Letter to Keith Sagar, 18 July 1998, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 719. This text is confusingly included in the first ‘Uncollected’ section in New Selected Poems. In fact it was published as a limited edition book in 1973 and collected in the Faber volume Moortown (1979).

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Ariel, in which he changed the contents. For several years he was embroiled in a legal action in America, brought by a woman who considered that she was libellously portrayed in a film of Plath’s novel The Bell-Jar. Whenever he could, Hughes avoided getting involved in public debate about his relations with Plath. On many occasions his sister Olwyn defended him, loyally but sometimes rebarbatively. At the end of his life, when he published Birthday Letters, he regretted not having much earlier written and published such an account. He believed that not having done so had thwarted his creative development. 1.8 The Poet Laureate

The Poet Laureateship is a peculiar institution. It was first formally established in the seventeenth century, and the main role of the Laureate was to write odes to the monarch at New Year and on his or her birthday. This was considered a demeaning function for a man of genius and, after the first Laureate, John Dryden, the post was filled by a long series of nonentities. It became traditional to mock the Laureate, as in Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (about his successor Thomas Shadwell), Pope’s Dunciad and Byron’s Vision of Judgment. In the nineteenth century a change was made: the Laureate no longer had to write royal odes, and the post was considered as an honour bestowed on the greatest poet of the age. In this spirit the Laureateship was awarded to Wordsworth and Tennyson. In the twentieth century the post had been filled by a series of competent, sometimes popular, but not outstanding poets. From 1972 to 1984 the Laureate was John Betjeman, an establishment figure and a gifted writer of accessible poetry who nevertheless failed dismally when he attempted to write about royal subjects. The appointment was for life, and when Betjeman died it was offered to Philip Larkin. But Larkin had written almost no poetry for ten years, and he refused. The appointment of the second choice, Ted Hughes, was surprising and controversial. He was not considered an establishment figure (though he inevitably became one on accepting the Laureateship): his poetry was not urbane and civilised; he was openly critical of the religion that the monarch was supposed to defend; some of his most famous poetry was considered crude and even obscene.

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Yet Hughes’s approach to the role was a return to the traditions of more than a century earlier. He wrote poems to celebrate royal birthdays and weddings, and turned out to be especially a devotee of the Queen Mother. It became clear that throughout his work there is a strong vein of conservative rural nationalism, and he wrote of the monarchy as a symbol of the spiritual unity of the nation. The Laureateship coincided with the start of a decline in Hughes’s reputation. None of his books between River (1983) and Tales from Ovid (1997) made much of a mark, and his efforts as Laureate were, like those of his predecessors, mostly derided. He brought out a book of Laureate poems, Rain-Charm for the Duchy, in 1992, and it is revealing that the only one he reprinted in New Selected Poems is the very first, published to celebrate the birth of Prince Harry which coincided with his appointment, but written before he became Laureate. Apart from Laureate poems Hughes spent much of his later years writing a huge, eccentric but at times brilliant study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and translating: as well as Tales from Ovid he did several excellent translations of classical and modern dramas. Above all he completed Birthday Letters which, as I have said, transformed his reputation at the very end of his life.

Part 2: Artistic strategies and influences 2.1 ‘Dialect’

Hughes once said that ‘Whatever other speech you grow into, presumably your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom .... Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse.’ ‘Dialect’ is a slippery term, and in the sense of a distinct regional variant of a language, it would be difficult to detect dialect in Hughes’s verse. However, the English language is stratified in relation to region and even more importantly to social class. English is a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Norman French. These elements are morphologically different, and have different social and regional connotations. A skilled poet is able to manipulate them to expressive effect. In ‘View of a Pig’, for example, there is a predominance of monosyllables, consonantal endings and short vowels. Every line ends with a consonant, and twenty-five out of thirty-six end with monosyllables. These features are characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, rather than the Norman French, elements in English and, by extension, with northern and working-class rather than southern and educated speech. In the first two stanzas only one word, ‘just’, is of French origin. Thus a particular kind of speaker is insinuated. The subject of the poem, with its dead farm animal and recollection of a village fair, is rural and agricultural; it deals with ‘deadly factual’ realities, dismissing ‘distinctions and admirations’ which are tellingly couched in polysyllabic, Latinate diction. The speaker is implicitly a down-to-earth rural northerner, and the language is chosen to give authority to his portrayal of the dead pig. These features of Hughes’s poetic language are almost certainly aspects of what he considered his ‘dialect’. Such effects are even more obvious, and obviously designed, in ‘Thistles’, where the prickly plants are imagined as the spirits of dead Vikings: ‘a grasped fistful/ Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p202

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thrust up’. Here there is only a single long vowel, and, in a line and a half, no fewer than three instances of four consonants clustered together. The aural effect is vehement and even aggressive, again with an unmistakably northern cast. But Hughes is not trapped in a limited range of phonological effects. The point I am making is that his sense of having grown up among dialect speech makes him conscious of these aspects of language. He is able to exploit the full range. In the second stanza of ‘Pike’ he wants to evoke a sense of exotic glamour in these very native fish, living in the strange otherworld of the water, and to do so he emphasises words from the polysyllabic French and Latin end of the spectrum: Or move, stunned by their own grandeur Over a bed of emerald, silhouette Of submarine delicacy and horror

Hughes has as much of an intimate feel for the precise tonality of emerald (rich in sound as well as connotation) and silhouette (a disturbing shadowiness enhanced by whispering phonetics and hints of artifice) as he has for ‘thick pink bulk’ and ‘like a sack of wheat’. Hughes went on to say that ‘West Yorkshire dialect ... connects you directly and in your most intimate self to middle English poetry.’ Since the first poet in what Hughes called his ‘sacred canon’ is Chaucer, we might think this is what he means; but Chaucer was a Londoner, and the founder of the more courtly, liquid, iambic tradition of English verse. Much as Hughes obviously admired Chaucer, it is the more northern alliterative tradition of medieval poetry whose influence can be detected in his verse. Consider the opening stanza of ‘Wind’: This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet.

The first line is a regular iambic pentameter, but the second drastically breaks the iambic pattern, with heavy juxtaposed stresses, an irregular number of unstressed  ‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, interview with Drue Heinz, Paris Review 134, Spring 1995, p. 61  Much later Hughes wrote a modernised version of part of the great medieval alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. See Selected Translations pp. 156–72

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syllables, and a strong medial pause. This pattern, which is typical of medieval alliterative poetry, is more obvious in the last two lines, where it is reinforced by actual alliteration. This emphatic and irregular rhythm reinforces the phonic effects I have been discussing in this section. 2.2 Shakespeare, Romantics and Moderns

The other poets in Hughes’s ‘sacred canon’ (which he said was ‘fixed by the time I got to university, at twenty-one’) are Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot. We might think Shakespeare is an automatic obeisance, but Hughes paid close attention to the way Shakespeare uses language, and specified certain key characteristics. In the same interview in which he talked about dialect, he recalled that at school he ‘suddenly recognized’ that Shakespearean language is not ‘a super-processed, super-removed, super-arcane language like Milton’ but ‘super-crude ... backyard improvisation’ and that ‘The whole crush and cramming throwaway expressiveness of it was right at the heart of it dialect.’ Consider again the opening stanza of ‘Wind’. It begins with a metaphor of a storm at sea, but in the third line the winds become horses and in the fourth have mysteriously turned into riders ‘astride’ the horses. In terms of the image ‘blinding wet’ suggests that the wind (as horse or rider) is blinded, whereas naturalistically it describes the effect of the wind on someone exposed to it. This kind of mixed metaphor is an example of Hughes’s ‘throwaway expressiveness’, and is typical of Shakespeare, as in Hamlet’s ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’ or (possibly at the back of Hughes’s mind when he wrote these lines) Macbeth’s And pity, like a naked newborn babe Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind (I.vii.21-25)

where the image of the newborn babe striding the blast is absurd if literally visualised; grammatically the subject of ‘blow’ is ‘heaven’s cherubim’ but a reader (or audience) more naturally associates it with ‘blast’; ‘sightless’ seems  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 203

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to belong with ‘eye’ rather than ‘couriers’; and tears should surely drown the person shedding them not the wind that caused them. Marlowe seems a less profound influence, but may lie behind Hughes’s early liking for rhetorical effects such as these lines from ‘Famous Poet’— The old heroic bang from their money and praise From the parent’s pointing finger and the child’s amaze, Even from the burning of his wreathed bays—

where the archaism gives away the inspiration from Elizabethan drama, a speech by a word-drunk character such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The Romantics, especially Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, are much more significant. Coleridge’s belief in the imagination as a fundamentally creative faculty, Blake’s espousal of vision, and Wordsworth’s affirmation of nature as the source of his poetic gift (although in fact mutually contradictory) are all deeply interfused in Hughes’s poetic practice. The first line of ‘The ThoughtFox’ is steeped in the Romantic tradition: ‘I imagine this midnight moment’s forest’. The whole process is started off by an act of imagination: this is literally the only act attributed to the poet in the poem. What he imagines is a clear verbal echo of ‘the forest of the night’ in which Blake imagines his tiger, for which the fox is Hughes’s equivalent. The opening scenario, with the poet sitting lonely at his desk at midnight in front of a dark window, recalls Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’: The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. ‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness.

Hughes’s speaker becomes aware that ‘Something else is alive’, just as Coleridge’s notices the flickering film on the grate, and in each case the poem flows from this ‘companionable form’ as Coleridge calls it. The link with Wordsworth is less direct but perhaps more profound. Blake’s tiger is a symbol—it owes nothing to observation of actual big cats. Coleridge’s ‘companionable form’ is not

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a living creature at all but the creation of human perception. But Hughes’s fox, although in one aspect it is only a thought, by the third and fourth stanzas has become a real, autonomous creature moving in the natural world, described as only someone with a deep commitment to that world could do. Wordsworth never described a living creature like this, but he shared the commitment. Gerard Manley Hopkins is a Victorian poet with deep roots in the Romantics, especially Wordsworth and Keats, and a powerful influence on modern poetry. He wrote with a strong feeling for the body of language, a religious intensity, and a deep, almost erotic attachment to the natural world, all of which appealed to Hughes. At times the early Hughes merely imitates Hopkins’s surface mannerisms, such as heavy alliteration and class-shifts: Spurn it muck under His foot-clutch, and, opposing his eye’s flea-red Fly-catching fervency to the whelm of the sun, Trumpet his own ear dead. (‘Egg-Head’)

There is a more subtle and meaningful allusion in that opening line of ‘The Thought-Fox’, where the alliteration of ‘midnight moment’ echoes ‘morning’s minion’, Hopkins’s ‘Windhover’ or kestrel which takes over the poem just as Hughes’s fox does, and is similarly the result of close, devoted observation of nature. Hughes can be seen directly imitating W. B. Yeats in juvenile poems such as ‘The Recluse’ (quoted in Section 1.3) and ‘Here in the Green and Glimmering Gloom’, also published in Collected Poems. In his mature verse the debt to both Yeats and Eliot is not a matter of imitation or echo, but a more general orientation to the writing of poetry. As well as offering a subtler rhythm from The Wanderings of Oisin, Yeats provided an example of a modern poet in the tradition of Blake, who believed in vision and was steeped in mythology. Yeats was, Hughes said, his ‘dominant passion in poetry up to and through university.’ Later in life Eliot came to supplant Yeats as Hughes’s most important modern poetic exemplar. This was because Hughes considered that Yeats’s literal belief in the supernatural placed him on the other side of a historical gulf. Hughes was conscious of living, as he said of Ovid, at a time when the ‘mythic plane, so to  ‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, p. 61

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speak, had been defrocked.’ He came to feel more affinity with Eliot because he felt that Eliot shared the dilemma of engaging with spiritual or ‘sacred’ realities in a secularised context. 2.3 The White Goddess

Before Hughes went to Cambridge his teacher John Fisher, who had been the biggest influence on him at school, gave him a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. This book was to be more influential on Hughes than anything other than Shakespeare and the Bible—certainly than any work of prose. Graves’s central contention is that poetry is a fundamentally different mode of thought from prose, and that to apply the disciplines of prose and of rationality to poetry is to destroy it. Many poets would agree with this, but Graves’s argument takes a peculiar and, in the view of many people, insidious form. The true poet is a devotee of the Muse; but this word is not just a fancy term for inspiration. The Muse is specifically feminine—the Goddess of his title—and the poet must obey her. Graves was hostile to the tradition of rational sceptical thought deriving from Socrates, which he called ‘The male intellect trying to make itself spiritually self-sufficient.’ It will be seen that Graves’s archetypal poet is a man: ‘woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing’, though he backtracked from the absurd implications of this. For Hughes the Goddess was above all manifest in the natural world, but she was also a symbol of the feminine aspect of the male psyche or, in the terminology of another writer who influenced Hughes, Carl Jung’s Anima. The idea of the Goddess becomes most explicit in his mythological poetry of the 1970s, and of course in his study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. 2.4 The influence of Sylvia Plath

Throughout his relationship with Sylvia Plath Hughes believed that she had a  Tales from Ovid, p. xi  ‘The Poetic Self: a Centenary Tribute to T. S. Eliot’, Winter Pollen, pp. 268–92  Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948), amended and enlarged edition, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966, p. 12  The White Goddess, p. 446

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great poetic gift, but that she was failing to break through to her true poetic voice. He had already found himself as a poet when he met her in 1956: she did not do so fully until their personal relationship collapsed. For this reason her poetry does not significantly influence his until after her death. The Plath scholars Susan Van Dyne and Lynda K. Bundtzen have drawn attention to the special interest of a poem Plath wrote in August 1962, called ‘Burning the Letters’. This was soon after Plath had learned of Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill, and the title refers to her incineration of some of Hughes’s papers, in response to this discovery. It is the only poem she wrote in this month, and she did not choose it for publication in Ariel: her great creative flowering began in October, when the couple had separated. Van Dyne and Bundtzen are interested in the fact that the poem is partly written on the reverse of a typescript of ‘The Thought-Fox’, and they see it as in part a response to, even an assault on, that poem and Hughes’s image as a poet. ‘Burning the Letters’ concludes: The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like— A red burst and a cry That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop With the dead eye And the stuffed expression, but goes on Dyeing the air, Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water What immortality is. That it is immortal.

Plath’s earlier verse suffers from an excessive intricacy and formality, which does not serve but stifles her inspiration. Her development in Ariel is towards a more dramatic, colloquial, informal and seemingly (only seemingly!) spontaneous style. Lynda Bundtzen descibes this poem as ‘halting in its rhythms, enervated in its tone, and misshapen on the page.’ It is ‘an anti-thought fox’, a rejection of ‘poetic lyricism’ and ‘literary convention’ in favour of ‘the poetic efficacy of shrieks’: ‘In quarrelling with Hughes’s telling of the fox’s story, Plath contests his prior claims to immortality.’ As we have already seen in the case of ‘Wind’ and ‘View of a Pig’, the language of Hughes’s earlier poetry is often highly informal. Nevertheless most of his early poems look neat on the page, with regu Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s “Burning the Letters”’, Contemporary Literature 39.3, 1998, pp. 437–43

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lar line-length and stanzaic forms, even if they dispense with regular rhyme and metre. More importantly, in ‘The Thought-Fox’ and other poems such as ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘The Jaguar’, Hughes implicitly or explicitly identifies with the predatory creature, who is portrayed as in some way transcendent, if not immortal: ‘long after I am gone ... every time anyone reads [“The Thought-Fox”] the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness’; ‘I am going to keep things like this’ (‘Hawk Roosting’); ‘The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel’ (‘The Jaguar’). In Plath’s poem the predatory creature—Hughes’s totem animal, as we have seen not only from his poem but from his Cambridge dream—is itself a victim, and its death is narrated in deliberately crude, ragged verse. In the weeks immediately following Plath’s death Hughes wrote two animal poems that portray the creature in a completely different light from that of his earlier poetry. ‘Song of a Rat’ is written from the point of view of a rat caught in a trap, while in ‘The Howling of Wolves’, inspired by the sound of the wolves at Regents Park Zoo that Hughes could hear from Plath’s flat, into which he had moved after her death, the wolf ‘goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.’ In both poems the creature is portrayed as a victim: in the case of the wolves, they are victims of their own predatory nature, who ‘never learn how it has come about that they must live like this.’ Stylistically these poems resemble ‘Burning the Letters’ much more than any earlier poems of Hughes: ‘halting’ in rhythm, ‘enervated’ in tone and ‘misshapen’ in form. The ‘screech’ that piercingly punctuates the first part of ‘Song of a Rat’ and the howling of the wolves like ‘long leashes of sound’ are Hughes’s equivalent of ‘the poetic efficacy of shrieks’, the ‘cry ... that does not stop’ in ‘Burning the Letters’. His earlier poetry is not for the most part conventionally pretty, but here he has discovered a new aesthetic of ugliness which will form the basic aesthetic principle of Crow. 2.5 Shamanism

In 1964 Hughes wrote a review of a book by the Romanian philosopher and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, called Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The figure of the shaman is now quite familiar in Western culture, but  Poetry in the Making, p. 20

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in the 1960s the concept was unknown, and the reality obscured by caricatured representations of the ‘witch-doctor’ or ‘medicine-man’. In his review Hughes describes shamanism as ‘a technique for moving in a state of ecstasy among the various spiritual realms, and for generally dealing with souls and spirits in a practical way, in some practical crisis’. He especially emphasises the ways in which someone is chosen to be a shaman, and that ‘the most common form of election’ is when the spirits approach the man in a dream. There is, Hughes writes, no refusing of this call: ‘You must shamanize or die.’ He was familiar from his earlier reading with a lot of the phenomena that Eliade describes, but the concept of shamanism seems to have provided a particular focus for his interest. Hughes’s personal interest is obvious when he writes that ‘the initiation dreams, the general schema of the shamanic flight’ are ‘the basic experience of the poetic temperament we call “romantic”.’ By citing Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and Eliot he makes it clear that for him ‘romantic’ is not an academic category of writers of a particular period, but another name for what he called his ‘sacred canon’. Now, if not earlier, Hughes must have thought about his burnt fox dream at Cambridge, and interpreted it as a shamanic initiation: Eliade writes that the majority of shamanic ‘helping spirits’ have animal form. The obscure ‘single adventure’ that he imposed on the poems of Wodwo also sounds like a version of the shamanic call. When he wrote ‘You must shamanize or die’, he must have had in mind his belief, that he expressed a few years later in a letter to Peter Redgrove, that it is fatal to stop writing. He meant writing verse: when he became ill in the 1990s he told Andrew Motion that he had undermined his immune system by writing too much prose (his Shakespeare book), which is what the burnt fox had told him to stop doing. This is eccentric but it has a serious basis. The shaman has a public role, to ‘[deal] with souls and spirits ... in some practical crisis.’ The crisis that Hughes believed shaman-poets had to deal with in the twentieth century was, as he put it in his essay on Eliot, the ‘convulsive desacralization of the west.’ In Hughes’s view of history, Western  ‘Regenerations’, Winter Pollen, pp. 56–58  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), London, Routledge, 1988, p. 89  Letter to Peter Redgrove, 1970, Emory University, Atlanta  Feinstein, Ted Hughes: the Life of a Poet, p. 237  ‘The Poetic Self’, Winter Pollen, p. 272

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civilisation had been created by a series of falls from a sacred conception of life: Greek rationalism, Judaeo-Christian patriarchal monotheism, the Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions. The driving force of this desacralisation was rationalism, and the vehicle of rationalism was prose. Hughes would have agreed in spirit with another shaman-poet, the Australian Les Murray, that ‘Prose is Protestant-agnostic,/ story, discussion, significance,/ but poetry is catholic;/ poetry is presence.’ (Hughes was not a Catholic but he believed that the Reformation had been a disaster because it kicked the feminine, in the form of the Virgin Mary, out of Christianity.) One of his most ambitious works of the 1970s, Gaudete, is about a failed shaman; significantly, he wrote the first version of this in 1964, the year in which he read Eliade’s book. 2.6 East European Poetry

In 1965 Hughes founded, with his old Cambridge friend Daniel Weissbort, the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. Translating modern poetry became an important activity for Hughes, and in his Selected Translations, posthumously edited by Daniel Weissbort, there are versions of work by twelve writers of the twentieth century, as well as of classical ones. It was East European writers who at this time most compelled Hughes’s imagination. His reputation as a nature poet belies a deep engagement with twentieth century history, and he had a huge respect for writers whose work bore witness to the tragedies of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. He was later to publish translations of the Hungarian poet Janós Pilinsky, who had served in the German army and witnessed concentration camps, but in the 1960s the one with whom he felt the strongest affinity was the Serbian Vasko Popa, about whom he wrote one of his most important essays. Popa’s poetry had a direct influence on the style of Crow, and much of what Hughes writes about Popa illuminates his own work. Hughes used East European poets to work out his relationship to western writers of the same era, especially Samuel Beckett. He felt an affinity with Beckett as a writer whose vision is of ‘the torments of the spirit in a world reduced’ to ‘the struggle of animal cells’. However, he rejected Beckettian absurdism,  Les Murray, ‘Distinguo’, Dog Fox Field, Manchester, Carcanet, 1990  ‘Vasko Popa’, Winter Pollen, p. 221

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which he thought derived from an excessively detached, analytic standpoint, and excluded ‘the substance and feeling of ordinary life.’ He described western absurdists as ‘the spoiled brats of civilization disappointed of impossible and unreal expectations and deprived of the revelations of necessity.’ By contrast the poems of writers such as Vasko Popa, Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub ‘revolve around the living suffering spirit, capable of happiness, much deluded, too frail, with doubtful and provisional senses, so indefinable as to be almost silly, but palpably existing, and wanting to go on existing.’ This can be read as an instruction the reader on how to approach Crow, which was published the year after this essay: the ‘living suffering spirit’ is given memorable poetic expression in the last poem of Crow, ‘Littleblood’. Vasko Popa, of all these Eastern European poets, is especially valuable to Hughes because his work is unmistakably modern, and bears witness to the tragedies of modernity, but has roots in folk culture. In discussing Popa he distinguishes between ‘literary surrealism’, which is ‘at an extreme remove from the business of living under practical difficulties and successfully managing them’ (echoing what he says about Beckett) and ‘folktale surrealism’ which is ‘always urgently connected with the business of trying to manage practical difficulties’. The essay on Popa helps us to see how Hughes strove to be modern, and keep faith with the realities of the modern world, without cutting himself off from a traditional (and implicitly rural) culture that enshrined some of his most deeply held values. This aspiration is most clearly evident in Crow, and Hughes can be seen directly imitating Popa in the group of poems (scattered through the volume but originally conceived as a separate sequence of ‘Bedtime Stories’) such as ‘Crow’s Account of the Battle’, ‘The Contender’, ‘Crow’s Elephant Totem Song’ and ‘Revenge Fable’, which adopt a deceptively naive style as if telling a story to a child. This style is a direct imitation of Popa’s sequence, ‘The Yawn of Yawns’: Once upon a time there was a yawn Not under the palate not under the hat Not in the mouth not in anything  Winter Pollen, pp. 221–22  Winter Pollen, p. 226

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It was bigger than everything Bigger than its own bigness .... 2.7 Trickster Mythology

The stories, legends and above all religious outlook of pre-modern and tribal cultures are pervasively influential on Hughes’s work, but one particular source stands out because Hughes wrote about it, and because, like the influence of Eastern European poetry, it was ideologically as well as artistically important to him. The Trickster hero is a feature of many oral literatures, most prominently African (Ananse the Spider), African American (Brer Rabbit) and Native American (Coyote and Raven). It had a profound influence on twentieth-century popular culture, especially animated cartoons: not only were the figures of Wily Coyote and Roadrunner directly borrowed from Native American tales, but the typical ‘hero’ such as Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry has the basic characteristics of Trickster. The traditional Trickster is a mythological figure belonging to the time when the world as we (or the tribe) know it was coming into being. He often has animal form but he also has human characteristics, as well as some of the attributes of a god, such as indestructibility. He is clever but also a fool, both the perpetrator and the victim of tricks (sometimes the victim of his own tricks). In some forms he is a ‘culture hero’, credited with having invented or discovered the basic requirements of human culture such as the mastery of fire; at other times he is held responsible for the grimmer aspects of the human condition. He is protean and unpredictable, shocking and above all comic. In the classic cycle of the Winnebago Indians, for example, Trickster tells his anus to keep watch over his food while he sleeps, and when he wakes to find the food has been stolen he punishes his anus by branding it with a burning stake. In another episode he wants to have sex with a woman on the other side of a river, but can’t swim, so sends his penis across the river to do it for him. In the words of the anthropologist Paul Radin, Trickster ‘embodies the vague memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed no clear-cut differentiation between the divine  Vasko Popa, ‘The Yawn of Yawns’, Collected Poems 1973–1976, tr. Anne Pennington, Manchester, Carcanet, 1977

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and the non-divine ... he represents not only the undifferentiated and distant past, but likewise the undifferentiated present within every individual.’ Trickster mythology is a crucial influence on the figure of Crow and the form of his adventures. But for Hughes it was far more than a narrative device. In Winter Pollen he republished an essay called ‘Crow on the Beach’ (after one of the Crow poems), which had originally appeared under the title ‘A Reply to My Critics’. No critics are mentioned in this essay, which is basically an impassioned argument about how Crow should be read. It should not, according to its author, be read as ‘Black Comedy’ but as ‘Trickster literature’. This is important, Hughes says, because Black Comedy and Trickster literature are not just different categories but ‘absolute opposites’: Black Comedy is the end of a cultural process, Trickster literature is the beginning. Black Comedy draws its effects from the animal despair and suicidal nihilism that afflict a society or an individual when the supportive metaphysical beliefs disintegrate. Trickster literature draws its effects from the unkillable, biological optimism that supports a society or individual whose world is not yet fully created, and whose metaphysical beliefs are only just struggling out of the dream stage.’

I will discuss the direct relevance of this to Crow in Section 3. Here I want to point out that the opposition between Trickster literature and Black Comedy echoes and magnifies that between East European poets and absurdists, and between ‘literary’ and ‘folktale’ surrealism, in the Vasko Popa essay. Hughes understandably wanted to defend himself against accusations that Crow was no more than an exercise in a fashionable literary mode, but he goes further than this. If we look at the two essays together we can see him rejecting the major traditions of modern literature (surrealism, absurdism, black comedy) and aligning himself with archaic modes (Trickster literature, folktale). This is because he sees most modern literature as merely symptomatic of the plight that it represents: it ‘expresses the misery and disintegration of that, which is a reality, and so has a place in our attempts to diagnose what is happening to us’; consequently the writer who practises it is part of the problem. Hughes wants to align himself with what he considers the solution: ‘the renewing, sacred spirit, searching its  Paul Radin, The Trickster, London, Routledge, 1956, pp. 168–69  ‘Crow on the Beach’, Winter Pollen, p. 239

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depths for new resources and directives, exploring towards new emergence and growth.’ Hughes’s argument in this essay is oversimplified and circular, since he doesn’t define either of his categories with reference to anything but each other. The originality of Crow is that it combines the contemporary and the archaic. However, the essay is a vivid sign of Hughes’s ideological orientation, and above all his alienation from everything that he considers symptomatic of his age. 2.8 Confessional poetry

The term ‘confessional poetry’ was first coined by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, a volume that is still probably the classic of the genre. Rosenthal went on the make the term more current in his influential 1966 book, The New Poets. The term is most easily defined by quoting what Rosenthal writes about Lowell: ‘Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems into the poems of Life Studies .... Sexual guilt, alcoholism, repeated confinement in a mental hospital ... these are explicit themes in a number of the poems, usually developed in the first person and intended without question to point to the author himself.’ The reference to humiliations, sufferings and psychological problems indicates that confessionalism as Rosenthal understood it involved a painful baring of the soul, akin to the Catholic sacrament, and it was especially linked to madness and suicide. This gave it an obvious glamour. The four poets to whom this label was usually attached were Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: all these poets spent time in mental hospitals, and three of them took their own lives. Lowell and A. Alvarez, writing about Plath after her death, took this romantic glamorisation to the limit: for Lowell, the poems were ‘playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’, and for Alvarez, ‘Poetry of this order is a murderous art.’ Subsequently the term has been used more loosely to refer to any poetry that is overtly autobiographical.  Winter Pollen, p. 240  See my book Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry, Harlow, Longman, 1999, pp. 36–48 for a fuller discussion of Trickster Mythology and Black Comedy in Crow.  M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, London, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 26

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The popularity of Confessional poetry—or the idea of poetry that points ‘without question ... to the author himself’—challenged the more austere and hitherto influential view of T. S. Eliot that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ Until the last year of Hughes’s life the idea that confessionalism influenced him would have been considered laughable. He was emphatically of the T. S. Eliot school. He protested against the ‘person I’ve projected, in the body of my poems’ being identified with himself. At the end of his life, reflecting on his earlier attitude, he wrote that when poets such as Lowell and Sexton ‘deal with the episode directly, as material for an artistic work’ he ‘despised it’. He believed ‘it would have to emerge obliquely, through a symbol, inadvertently’, and gave narrative poems by Shakespeare, Keats and Coleridge (all of course members of his ‘sacred canon’) as examples. He felt he had begun to do this in Crow. It is important to realise that Hughes did not consider Plath to be a ‘confessional’ poet in this sense. In this he was right. Plath’s poetry draws much of its strength from extremes of personal experience, but so does all good writing. The routine description of Plath as a confessional poet, and the widespread public familiarity with the details of her life, obscure the fact that her poems are highly fictive, she uses a variety of personae, and it would not be possible to reconstruct her life story from the poetry. However, by the time he published Birthday Letters Hughes came bitterly to regret having pursued the principle of impersonality. He felt these poems were ‘so raw, so vulnerable, so naïve, so self-exposing and unguarded’ that it was as if he had committed ‘some kind of obscure crime publishing them’, yet it was a liberating experience. Birthday Letters doesn’t, like Life Studies, reveal details of the poet’s personal madness, alcoholism, or even sexual guilt. But, unlike any of Hughes’s earlier poems, they only make sense if the reader identifies the speaker directly with the poet. He wrote them over a period of more than twenty years, but it is the completion of the project and the publication that seems to have had a transforming effect on Hughes’s view of himself and his career. The process gave him ‘free energy I hadn’t known since Crow.’ He now believed that  T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, London, Faber, 1952, p. 18  Letter to Keith Sagar, September/October 1973, p. 337  Letter to Keith Sagar, 18 July 1998, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 719

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‘My high-minded principal [sic] was simply wrong—for my own psychological & physical health. It was stupid.’ Hughes died believing that he had not fulfilled himself as a poet, and that the tragedies in his life—or the way he had responded to them—were responsible for this failure.

 ibid.

Part 3: Reading New Selected Poems 3.1 The Hawk in the Rain

Apart from ‘Song’, which Hughes wrote when he was nineteen, the poems in The Hawk in the Rain were written between 1954 and 1957. In the various editions of his Selected Poems Hughes dropped the title poem and placed at the head of his work ‘The Thought-Fox’. I have already said enough about this poem to suggest why it might occupy this privileged position. It is clearly related to his dream of the burnt fox and therefore to his sense of his vocation as a shaman-poet. It is a poem about the writing of poetry, and can be taken as an instruction in how to read Hughes’s work. It begins with the words ‘I imagine’, but the human speaker soon disappears from the poem. He occupies a bleak world of ‘the clock’s loneliness’ and ‘this blank page’ where his ‘fingers move’, apparently independently of his will. The poem, and the speaker’s world, are brought alive by his awareness that ‘Something else is alive’. This moment of awareness is the crucial experience of Hughes’s poetry, and is repeated in poem after poem. It is the moment in which the surface mind gets in touch with the inner source, or with his soul. In the second stanza he sees no star out of the window, but is becoming aware of ‘Something more near/ Though deeper within darkness’ than the star. The speaker’s innermost depth is more distant from his conscious mind than a star, but it is this innermost depth that must speak in the poem. Henceforth the first person disappears from the poem: it is taken over by the fox. In the middle stanzas the fox is so brilliantly realised that we forget it is only a ‘thought’: the central conundrum or mystery of the poem is that it is both a thought and a real fox. In this poem Hughes already displays a technical accomplishment that is completely at the service of his theme, above all in the central stanzas that evoke the fox’s movement. This movement is also the movement of the poem, imaginatively fusing poem and fox. The image of the lame shadow lagging by stump

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and in hollow insinuates the visual effect of a shadow broken by uneven terrain, but this visual image is subsumed into the shadow as image of the fox’s fear. The fox is separated from its shadow, as if it leaves its fear behind, and its boldness is represented by the leap across the stanza-break, and by the shift from the dragging, front-heavy stresses of ‘Shadow lags by stump and in hollow’ to the rapid anapaestic rhythm of ‘Of a body that is bold to come ....’ The identification of the fox with the poem is rounded off a little too neatly when the pun on ‘neat prints into the snow’ is taken up by the final line ‘The page is printed’, but otherwise the reader is drawn into and held by the strange psychology of poetic composition, in which time seems suspended between ‘the clock’s loneliness’ in the first stanza and ‘the clock ticks’ in the last. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is one of the poems that, on one hand, created a rather limited image of Hughes as an ‘animal poet’ but, more profoundly, established the compelling sense of kinship between the poet and his animal subjects. Another is ‘The Jaguar’, possibly the earliest, apart from ‘Song’, of the poems collected in New Selected Poems. This poem takes a little longer to get going than ‘The Thought-Fox’, but once the jaguar appears on the scene half-way through it is equally compelling. ‘The Jaguar’ is a response to a famous poem by the German modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Der Panther’. Both poems are about caged animals. Rilke’s panther is defeated, almost denatured, by his imprisonment: ‘It seems to him there are a thousand bars/ and behind a thousand bars no world.’ Rilke evokes ‘The supple pace of powerful soft strides’ as the animal circles in its cage, but the circular walk is ‘a dance of strength around a centre/ in which a great will stands numbed.’ For Hughes’s jaguar, by contrast, ‘there’s no cage to him/ More than to the visionary his cell:/ His stride is wildernesses of freedom.’ Less explicitly than ‘The Thought-Fox’, but just as unmistakably, the jaguar represents the inner life which may be ignored by the conscious ego, but cannot be repressed. As in ‘The Thought-Fox’, the jaguar’s movement becomes that of the poem, especially in the wonderful sprung rhythm of the final lines: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel: Over the cage floor the horizons come.  Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Panther’, New Poems [1907], tr. Edward Snow, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984, p. 73

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Hughes’s use of animals to represent the inner life of human beings perhaps needs some explanation. Hughes cast some light on this in an essay written two decades after these poems, ‘Myth and Education’: ‘the outer world is only one of the worlds we live in. For better or worse we have another, and that is the inner world of our bodies and everything pertaining.’ So the ‘inner world’, the world of our deepest selves and, as Hughes sometimes says, souls, is the ‘world of our bodies’. It is the world we share with the animals. The third outstanding poem in The Hawk in the Rain is ‘Wind’. I have already discussed the shifting, unanchored imagery of the first stanza. The way Hughes uses language is a direct counterpart of the physical and psychological effect of the material world on the human protagonists: language becomes unanchored just as ‘the tent of the hills ... strained its guyrope’, ‘the roots of the house’ seem to move, and the people ‘cannot entertain book, thought,// Or each other.’ The wind is a natural phenomenon but also more than that: it represents the underlying reality of nature that subverts our mental construction of the world. The confrontation of the human ego—the poet, the zoo visitors, the people in the house—by a force that threatens to overwhelm it is the main recurring theme of The Hawk in the Rain. It is directly portrayed in ‘Meeting’ where the explicitly self-regarding protagonist (‘He smiles in a mirror’) is shocked out of his egotistical complacency by a goat that is also a ‘black devil’; and more implicitly in ‘October Dawn’ where the glass of wine left out overnight is iced over by a natural force that evokes ‘Mammoth and Sabre-tooth’. The imagery in both these poems is strong, but Hughes is confining himself formally—by rhyming couplets and terza rima—in ways that aren’t well suited to his style. The most powerful force threatening the human ego is of course death, and in two of these poems Hughes evokes the power of the spectacle and even the thought of death. ‘The Casualty’ (with ‘The Jaguar’, one of the first-published of Hughes’s mature poems) focuses on the witnesses of the death of an airman, for whom ‘the burned man/ Bulked closer greater flesh and blood than their own’. ‘Six Young Men’ describes a photograph of a group of friends (presumably comrades of Hughes’s father) all of whom died in war within six months. The poem shows the influence of Wilfred Owen in the way it details the death of each young man, but its main focus is the effect on the person looking at the  ‘Myth and Education’, Winter Pollen, p. 143

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photo for whom Such contradictory permanent horrors here Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out One’s own body from its instant and heat. 3.2 Lupercal

The title of Hughes’s second volume, from a poem he didn’t choose for the New Selected, refers to a Roman fertility ritual, and the name derives from the Latin lupus, meaning wolf. The title is a sign of the importance of myth, ritual and pagan religion in Hughes’s work, which will become more overt, and the poem ‘February’ evokes ‘the last wolf killed in Britain’, an emblem of the elemental life stifled by civilisation. Most of Hughes’s most celebrated ‘animal’ poems are in Lupercal, and in their various ways their animal subjects represent that elemental life. One of the most outstanding of these is ‘Pike’. This poem consists of two ‘movements’. The first, seven stanzas long., evokes a series of brilliant images of the beauty and ferocity of the fish, epitomised by the phrase, ‘submarine delicacy and horror’. The pike is portrayed as an eating machine, ‘A life subdued to its instrument’, for which eating to live and living to eat are indistinguishable. In Section 2.1 I cited the lines Or move, stunned by their own grandeur Over a bed of emerald, silhouette Of submarine delicacy and horror

as an example of Hughes drawing on the polysyllabic, Norman-French register to produce an effect of exotic beauty. In the same poem we are shown two dead pike, ‘One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet’, in which an abrupt, vernacular diction is deployed (as in ‘View of a Pig’) to give a plain-speaking authority to the witness. In this first ‘movement’ ‘Pike’ can fairly be described as a ‘nature poem’, though a harsh and minatory one. In the last four stanzas the rhythm, tone and focus change significantly. The change is from a harsh and brilliant visual representation of the evidence for the pikes’ predatory nature to an echoing and ultimately dreamlike meditation in which the focus turns inwards.

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It seems to be another in the series of anecdotes that have made up the poem, about ‘A pond I fished’, but it is a pond of ‘legendary depth’ that holds ‘Pike too immense to stir’. The speaker, implicitly a child in recollection, becomes terrified by his own imaginings. The language begins to echo eerily—‘past ... cast ... cast ... fished’, ‘what might move ... what eye might move’. Instead of the abrupt, facing-facts diction of ‘One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet’ we enter a long, meandering sentence in which we lose our sense of the structure. External sounds such as the splashing of the pond and owl hooting fade, ‘Frail on my ear’ as the speaker’s attention is wholly consumed by ‘the dream/ Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,/ That rose slowly towards me, watching.’ The pike are no longer real creatures out there in the world but representations of an inward reality—dream-pike, like the thought-fox. Even the words ‘Darkness beneath night’s darkness’ recall ‘deeper within darkness’ in ‘The Thought-Fox’. However, whereas the earlier poem pulls out of the trance in which the subject is at the mercy of his predatory inner self, with the safe conclusion, ‘The page is printed’, the action of this poem is incomplete, and we leave the young fisherman hypnotised by the dream-pike rising towards him and watching him. This is the ‘invitation or importuning of a subjective world’, which Hughes said was the main event of the ‘single adventure’ of Wodwo. Again and again Hughes’s poems read like fragments of an obscure inward narrative of visitation, usurpation and abduction: here the speaker is visited by the pike, his ordinary consciousness is usurped, perhaps he is about to be devoured or abducted into those ‘legendary depths’. In 1970 Hughes gave an interview to the critic Ekbert Faas, which I have already cited, and which Faas incorporated into his book Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe. One topic raised in this interview touched such a nerve in Hughes that, over twenty years later, he expanded his answer into an essay, ‘Poetry and Violence’. Referring to the usual cliché account of Hughes’s early poetry, Faas said, ‘Critics have often described your poetry as “The poetry of violence”’ and asked, ‘How does such poetry relate to our customary social and humanitarian values?’ Hughes begins his answer by recalling that the poet Edwin Muir had spoken of ‘admirable violence’ in The Hawk in the Rain, but that when critics described his poetry as violent the word usually had pejorative .

 All references to this essay are from Winter Pollen pp. 251–67

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implications. He points out that this pejorative usage associates ‘violence’ with ‘violation’. In contrast he refers to Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus, when he fell down, ceased to exist, and rose again as Paul. This is a very instructive example, because it shows us that for Hughes what critics call ‘violence’ is a kind of transformative energy with strong religious connotations. In the essay he repeats the phrase ‘our customary social and humanitarian values’ with increasingly scathing emphasis, referring to carnivorous human beings who are ‘sickened by the sight of lions killing and devouring a zebra’ on television. The poems Hughes discusses in this essay are all in Lupercal. He makes an extended defence of ‘Thrushes’, and also mentions ‘Pike’, ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘The Bull Moses’: he could as easily have referred to ‘Esther’s Tomcat’, ‘Cat and Mouse’ or even ‘Snowdrop’. I began them as a series in which they would be angels ... composed of terrific, holy power ... Like Sons of God ... I wanted to focus my natural world—these familiars of my boyhood—in a ‘divine’ dimension ... Again, these creatures are ‘at rest in the law’—obedient, law-abiding, and are as I say the law in creaturely form.

Hughes’s discussion of ‘Thrushes’ focuses mainly on the stanza in which he compares the birds’ predatory ferocity to ‘Mozart’s brain ... and the shark’s mouth/ That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own/ Side and devouring of itself.’ He speculates, probably rightly, that comparing Mozart’s sublime genius to a ‘frenziedly devouring shark’ is itself felt by some readers as ‘a wanton act of “violence”’ perpetrated by the writer. His justification of these comparisons is that the images are all ‘hieroglyphs’ of ‘divine activity in something fleshly.’ The argument that thrushes or sharks following their instincts are acting in obedience to God, and in that sense are comparable to the most sublime of human activities, seems to me a perfectly valid one. However, his use of the word ‘hieroglyphs’ betrays an attitude to language that occasionally undermines his poetic effectiveness. ‘The shark’s mouth/ That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own/ Side’ is not a hieroglyph but a brilliantly effective poetic image, that works by attributing the functions of the nose and the stomach to the mouth, so that the fish becomes ‘all mouth’, its whole being concentrated into the one organ, like the pike ‘subdued to its instrument’. By contrast ‘Mozart’s brain’ is a completely inert phrase, the poet has done no work on it; by calling it a hiero-

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glyph he seems to imply that, by merely mentioning it, he can make it function as a poetic image. This, rather than an objection on principle to the comparison, seems to me a valid reason for criticising these lines as poetry. ‘Thrushes’ is an uneven poem that raises more questions about Hughes’s metaphysical claims than he seems to realise. Its opening stanza is one of his most powerful pieces of writing, which deliberately sets out to subvert the image of the thrush as ‘one of the darlings of our pastoral idyll’ by focussing on its predatory nature. He describes the thrushes as ‘More coiled steel than living’ and in the second stanza writes of their ‘bullet and automatic purpose’. These images, by comparing the birds to mechanisms, and especially to the machinery of modern warfare, imply a more conflicted attitude to the subject than Hughes’s essay: in other words, the poem is more complex and interesting than the simple idea of creatures ‘at rest in the law’ implies. The most controversial poem in Lupercal, at least at the time of its publication, was ‘Hawk Roosting’. It is perhaps no coincidence that this is the only adult poem Hughes ever wrote in which a real animal speaks, so that there is no apparent gap between the hawk and the poet. In the original interview with Ekbert Faas Hughes says, ‘That bird is accused of being a fascist ... the symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator’ whereas ‘what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature.’ As with the thrushes, Hughes suggests that the hawk represents a ‘simple’ idea. Is it so simple, and were those readers who felt there was something fascist about the hawk merely blinkered? The hawk is sitting in the top of a tree, complacently reflecting on its position in the order of things, and especially on the way everything seems to be arranged for its own convenience. Perhaps the key lines of the poem are I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads.

The whole poem is a series of short, assertive statements like these. The statement ‘I kill where I please’ sounds like the ultimate in psychopathic consciousness, but it is of course perfectly right for the hawk. ‘My manners are tearing  Winter Pollen, p. 257  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 199

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off heads’ is a particularly deceptive and witty line, since it sounds like a brutal dismissal of the notion of manners but, if ‘manners’ means doing what is fitting, it is an entirely appropriate thing for the hawk to say. Except, of course, that it isn’t appropriate for a hawk to say anything at all. This may seem like a naive point, since there is a long tradition of animal fables in which creatures speak. But the point about ‘Hawk Roosting’ is that it says things about itself which are only acceptable because it is a creature incapable of speech. It is noticeable that the hawk doesn’t merely speak but makes extensive use of abstractions: ‘falsifying dream’, ‘rehearse’, ‘convenience’, ‘advantage’, ‘inspection’, ‘Creation’, ‘sophistry’, ‘manners’, ’allotment’, ‘arguments’, ‘permitted’. As is usually the case with abstractions, these words are nearly all from the educated, Norman French range of English, whereas one might expect a simple bird to speak plainly and unpretentiously. The hawk rejects human concepts (‘our customary humanitarian and social values’) in phrases such as ‘falsifying dream’, ‘no sophistry’, ‘no arguments’, but it knows what these things mean. There may be no sophistry in its body, but the idea of sophistry is in its head. We may even call the hawk an intellectual. This is why it is an oversimplification for Hughes to say it is ‘simply nature’, and why readers who interpret the hawk as a fascist are not misreading the poem. A hawk killing its prey, whose ‘manners are tearing off heads’, is an innocent creature fulfilling its nature; but a creature who is able to say ‘My manners are tearing off heads’ is partly human, and to that degree sinister. Hughes has again created a more complex, interesting poem than his own commentary suggests. Hughes has several times said that he wrote some of his best poems in almost no time. He wrote ‘The Thought-Fox’ ‘in a few minutes’; ‘Hawk Roosting’ ‘just came ... I simply wrote it out, just as it appeared in front of me.’ The most remarkable claim he made of this kind is about the second half of ‘An Otter’, which he said he literally hallucinated as a ‘written scroll hanging somewhere in the air’, a piece of entirely ‘involuntary’ composition. He much preferred this to the first part of the poem, considering it was written ‘with more subjectivity, more delicately’. We need not take these claims too literally: all the drafts of Hughes poems I have seen are extensively corrected, and it may be only the  Poetry in the Making p. 19; ‘‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, pp. 66–67; letter to Keith Sagar, 18June 1998, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 721

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first draft that came so quickly. Hughes’s description of ‘An Otter’ as ‘subjective’ is interesting, because of all his animal poems it perhaps the one that seems most objective in the sense that it faithfully attends to the life of the animal. It is a beautifully written poem, with memorable phrases such as ‘keeps fat in the limpid integument’ and ‘Big trout muscle out of the dead cold’, but what did Hughes mean by calling it ‘subjective’? Let us recall that what Hughes meant by ‘subjectivity’ was ‘the inner life of the body’. This poem is full of strong, intimate evocations of the otter’s physical life: ‘Pads on mud ... nostrils a surface bead ... sunk lungs... heart beats thick ... take stolen hold’. In addition to this it is a mysterious, elusive creature that moves between different elements. Perhaps the lines that give us the key to the poem’s subjectivity are ‘So the self under the eye lies,/ Attendant and withdrawn.’ This can easily be taken as part of the description of the otter, but it is actually a comparison, inviting us to see the otter as a metaphor of the human self, ‘under the eye’, like a wary, alert, unapproachable animal. 3.3 Wodwo

When admirers of Ted Hughes were asked to choose a single poem to write about in the posthumous celebratory volume The Epic Poise, more people chose from Wodwo than from any other collection. Perhaps this is not surprising, since Wodwo is a collection of the best poems, in Hughes’s opinion at the time, written over a period of seven years, which is more than twice as long as the period covered by Lupercal. As well as the very high quality of the poems in this volume, there is a much greater stylistic range than in either of the previous two books: not surprisingly, given the turmoil in Hughes’s private life, this is a period of change and experimentation. I have already pointed out (Section 2.4) that Hughes seems to have been jolted into a looser, ‘uglier’, less lyrical style by Sylvia Plath’s death and the example of some of her later poetry. But one of the most striking stylistic experiments is the title poem, which is one of the earliest-written poems in the volume. ‘Wodwo’ is a middle-English word that Hughes got from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (See Section 1.2). It is translated as ‘wood-demon’ and images of wodwos are sometimes to be seen in medieval churches. Hughes’s poem begins

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‘What am I?’ and the point of the name is partly to make the reader ask this question too: the speaker of this poem does not know what he or she is, and neither do we. The style of the poem is, for Hughes, uniquely fluid, eventually abandoning punctuation so that the second half needs ideally to be read aloud in a single breath. As a first-person monologue it invites comparison with ‘Hawk Roosting’, and the contrast is instructive. The hawk is assertive, speaking in short, declarative sentences. There is not a single question in the poem: the hawk is incapable of asking a question, or does not need to, since it already knows everything it needs to know about the world. ‘Wodwo’ by contrast is full of questions, starting with ‘What am I?’ which immediately establishes it as a very different kind of consciousness from the hawk’s. For the hawk ‘I kill where I please because it is all mine’, whereas the wodwo asks of the weeds, ‘do I fit in their world’. It has the beginnings of an ethical consciousness and therefore seems more human, or at least more acceptably human, than the hawk. The wodwo also seems very unclear about its relation to its own body (if it has one)—‘if I go/ to the end ... past these trees/ till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me’—and about its most basic functions such as eating: ‘Why do I find/ this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret/interior and make it my own?’ If this makes it sound very unlike a human being, the line ‘me and doing that have coincided very queerly’ both wittily summarises a philosophical question and evokes an all-too-familiar experience. Above all, the conclusion ‘I’ll go on looking’ suggests the exploratory imagination of the poet—a suggestion reinforced by making this the title poem. I have commented earlier on Hughes’s resistance to the absurdism of Samuel Beckett (Section 2.6). The end of ‘Wodwo’ echoes that of Beckett’s novel The Unnameable—‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’—but the spirit of Hughes’s poem is much more positive. By adopting the voice of a mythological creature in ‘Wodwo’ Hughes took a step towards the method that he would fully develop several years later in Crow. Another poem written in the early sixties that uses the same method is ‘Gog’. Hughes got this name from the Bible, where, in the Book of Ezekiel, Gog is one of the enemies of the Hebrew God, and more mysteriously Revelation, where Gog and Magog are ‘the nations of the four quarters of the earth’ who are  Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, London, Calder, 1959, p. 418

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deceived by Satan. Hughes himself said that the poem ‘actually started out as a description of the German assault through the Dardanelles [another inspiration from his father’s wartime experience] and turned into the dragon in Revelations. It alarmed me so much I wrote a poem about the Red Cross Knight [the hero of Book One of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and of course the patron saint of England] just to set against it with the idea of keeping it under control.’ In Wodwo the poem that is collected in New Selected Poems was only the first of three parts. The Red Cross Knight poem was the third part, but the figure of the knight is more alarming than the original Gog: ‘The rider of iron, on the horse shod with vaginas of iron.’ Like Wodwo, Gog is the voice of a creature that seems just to have come to consciousness. But whereas Wodwo exists in a purely natural world, the world Gog enters is that of Christian theology: he is woken by the shout, ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ (the beginning and the end), which is the claim of God in Revelation. Again like Wodwo, Gog seems in part an innocent creature who ‘drink[s] at a pool quietly’, and not to understand the conditions of his own existence: ‘What was my error? My skull has sealed it out.’ Presumably what alarmed Hughes about the poem is that unlike Wodwo Gog also represents a powerful and menacing energy: ‘I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on the earth/ Over the sounds of motherly weeping’ and ‘I become darkness ... that all night sings and circles stamping.’ Hughes described ‘Gog’ as a ‘jaguarish poem’, and said that the jaguar may be received as ‘a beautiful, powerful nature spirit’ or as ‘a demon’ depending on one’s point of view. We might therefore interpret Gog as such a nature spirit which has been demonised by the claim of God to be the beginning and the end, which excludes him from the Christian religious vision. A poem that is more obviously inspired by Hughes’s father’s war is ‘Out’. The first section takes its title, ‘The Dream Time’, from the Australian Aboriginal name for the spiritual realm. That Hughes should give this name to his father’s wartime trauma is the strongest possible indication of its importance for his formation. He finds a series of astonishingly powerful images for the father’s original experience and the effect it has on the family: life in the trenches was a ‘four   

Ezekiel 38–39; Revelation 20, 7–10 Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 200 Revelation 1, 8 Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, pp. 199–200

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year mastication’; the child is his father’s ‘luckless double’ whose consciousness is formed and trapped by the father’s ‘memory’s buried, immovable anchor’; in the poem he attempts to exorcise this memory, its effect on his mother—‘the cenotaphs on my mother’s breasts’—and even England itself, the ‘green and pleasant land’ of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ which becomes in Hughes’s poem a ‘green sea-anemone’, beautiful but deadly in its ability to trap the consciousness of its people in its ‘remaindered’ past. In complete contrast to the brooding, angry tone of ‘Gog’ and ‘Out’ is ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, a poem about Hughes’s daughter, at the age at which she is just beginning to speak. Hughes believed that ‘Every new child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ This was one motive for his writing so much for children, and at least in ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ the belief inspired an outstanding poem about childhood. Hughes uses rhythm, assonance and consonance to create the atmosphere of a rural evening from the child’s perspective. Consider the opening two lines: A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket— And you listening.

The contrast in line-length balances the single point of the child’s attention against the whole of the evening; but the evening itself is condensed, not only by the use of the word ‘shrunk’, but by the half-rhymes that draw the words together into a couple of vividly evoked sounds. These sharp, precise sounds contrast with the much more fluid ‘warm wreaths of breath’ of the cows in the sixth line. The poem hinges on the child’s exclamation, ‘Moon! ... Moon! Moon!’: a moment in which the wonder of the object and the wonder of being able to name it coalesce. In the final two lines a charming flight of fancy makes the moon as amazed as the child, and the child a work created by the moon. Hughes often appears to denigrate human beings in comparison with animals: here we have a counterexample in which the existence of the child balances that of the moon and by implication the whole universe. The poems from Wodwo that I have discussed so far were all written between 1960 and 1962, before the death of Sylvia Plath. As I have said earlier (Section 2.4) he wrote ‘Song of a Rat’ and ‘The Howling of Wolves’ immediately after  ‘Myth and Education’, Winter Pollen, p. 149

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her death, early in 1963. There followed a creative dearth, in which he struggled with a long verse drama, from which he later salvaged the poem ‘Ghost Crabs’. This is another version of the basic narrative that underlies poems such as ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘Pike’. Again the creatures emerge from a ‘depth darkness’ and usurp the consciousness of human beings: they ‘press through our nothingness’. This is a much more nightmarish version than ‘The Thought-Fox’, or even ‘Pike’, of the forces that ‘own this world’. In those earlier poems the creatures represented an explicitly or implictly creative force: the ghost crabs by contrast ‘stalk each other ... fasten on to each other ... mount each other ... tear each other to pieces.’ Hughes’s creative flow returned when he visited Ireland in 1966. There he wrote two of his finest poems, ‘Skylarks’ and ‘Gnat Psalm’. In both these poems Hughes demonstrates a new freedom of style and an intense but humorous exploration of the relationship between animals and human consciousness. Consider the second section of ‘Skylarks’. The verse form, with lines varying from one to ten syllables, seems as free as possible, but the poet’s command of rhythm and intonation makes it seems as tightly structured as a sonnet. In particular, the three short lines, consisting of only four syllables altogether, with the pauses between them, map rhythmically on to the longer line that follows; the rise from ‘climb’ to ‘sing’ mimics the lark’s flight tonally; and the rhyme of ‘sing’ with ‘thing’ brings a completion that at the same time complicates the effect, echoing the sound of the implicitly transcendent song while apparently reducing the lark to an object. The seventh section (which was the last in Wodwo—the final section in New Selected Poems is a later and I think ill-advised addition) shifts unsettlingly between imagery such as ‘flailing flames’, ‘last atom’, ‘burned out’, ‘buckling like razors’—which portray the larks in purely material terms—and ‘they’ve had enough’, ‘gives them the OK’, ‘not quite sure if they may’, ‘Conscience perfect’, which humanises them. The original poem ended with ‘Conscience perfect’ which seems completely anthropomorphic, but we have been made aware throughout of the human observer trying to make sense of the larks, and for whom their song is ‘incomprehensibly both ways’. ‘Skylarks’ is a poem of tense oppositions. ‘Gnat-Psalm’ is much more relaxed, written in a fluid style with little punctuation, and conveying a much more empathetic relationship to these creatures which are, if anything, more alien than

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birds. The style accommodates religious exaltation—‘dumb Cabala’—precise diction—‘frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments’—and high-spirited absurdity—‘Everybody everybody else’s yoyo’. If in the original version of ‘Skylarks’ the speaker concludes by seeing the birds in human terms, ‘Gnat-Psalm’ ends with his complete surrender to the insects: ‘Your dancing/ Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.’ 3.4 Crow

Hughes never published the narrative of Crow (see Section 1.6), and at the time of the book’s publication in 1970 he said it was ‘not really relevant to the poems as they stand.’ Nevertheless, in later years he often told episodes from the story at public readings, included narrative links in a recording of Crow, and authorised Keith Sagar to publish a version of the story in his book, The Laughter of Foxes. The book Crow made a huge impact when first published, on readers who knew nothing of the story, so clearly the poems work in their own right. Moreover, the versions that are in the public realm, in the recording and Sagar’s book, are incoherent and often quite desultory. There is just one episode that I think it is helpful to know: the very beginning. After God had created the world he has a nightmare in the form of a voice and a hand. The voice of the nightmare mocks God’s creation, telling him it is a terrible failure. God responds by challenging the nightmare to improve on his creation, and the nightmare’s response is to create Crow. Crow then becomes God’s companion, accompanying him about the early world, occasionally interfering in God’s creation. The nightmare, and to an extent Crow himself, are clearly variants on the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) idea of Satan, but the nightmare and by extension Crow himself seem more like suppressed aspects of God than his opposite. It would certainly be a mistake to approach Crow on the assumption that its protagonist is the embodiment of evil. Hughes said that the original idea of Crow was ‘an idea of a style ... I throw out the eagles and choose the Crow’ who sings ‘songs with no music whatever, in a  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 206

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super-simple and a super-ugly language’. This is a rather over-simplified description of the style, but it is a good starting point. It corresponds to what I have said above (Section 2.4) about the aesthetic of ugliness influenced by some of Sylvia Plath’s poems. A good example is the conclusion of ‘Lineage’. This poem begins as a parody of the lineages in the Bible (such as the opening of St Matthew’s Gospel), supposedly tracing Crow’s ancestry. It concludes with Crow Screaming for Blood Grubs, crusts Anything Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth

On first impression the final line may seem crude. On closer examination it is highly wrought, using sophisticated poetic techniques for an effect that challenges poetic convention. There is the class-shift, or transitive use of the intransitive verb ‘trembling’, the rhythmical change from the anapaestic opening to the abrupt and consonantal spondaic conclusion, and the concentrated repetition of the consonants of ‘featherless’ in ‘filth’. The result is a linguistically rich and visually and kinetically vivid image of the nestling Crow. Hughes literally throws out the eagles and chooses the Crow in ‘Crow and the Birds’. This poem begins with the line ‘When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald’ and concludes fifteen lines later, ‘Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.’ The whole poem is a single sentence, and in between the eagles and Crow there are more parodistically poetic evocations of birds, and others of birds evading the human environment. Crow, the culmination of the sentence, to whom all the other birds are grammatically subordinate, is the only one who is at home in the material human world, rather than a poetic reserve. The line that evokes him is another example of the aesthetic of ugliness: the vigorous use of an archaic verb (that is also a combination of ‘spread’ and ‘straddled’) combined with the Americanism ‘garbage’, the alliteration and energetic rhythm roughly holding together the long unit make this the most poetically as well as conceptually interesting line in the poem. Hughes uses this kind of technique more extensively in a number of Biblical  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 208

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parodies, which are the poems that most obviously correspond to the start of the narrative. In ‘A Childish Prank’ the creation of Adam and Eve is retold as an apparently crude anecdote portraying sex as the joining of two halves of a worm. The problem of creation ‘dragged [God] asleep’; Crow ‘bit the Worm ... into two writhing halves’ which he ‘stuffed’ respectively into man and woman; ‘Man awoke being dragged across the grass’. The narrative is condensed into a few simple, energetic verbs, ‘dragged’, ‘bit’, ‘writhing’, which are combined with provocative images such as the sleeping God, the Worm (or serpent) identified with Christ as God’s son, and the idea that it is sexual awakening which gives man and woman ‘souls’ (which they lack at the beginning of the poem). The provocative crudity may also be disconcertingly combined with poetic beauty of the most traditional kind, as in ‘A Horrible Religious Error’, which concludes with Crow brusquely dealing with the problem of evil in the form of the snake: he ‘Beat the hell out of it, and ate it’; but the snake itself is described as ‘flexing on that double flameflicker tongue/ A syllable like the rustling of the spheres’. ‘Apple Tragedy’ retells the story of the fall by reversing the roles of God and the serpent, and juggling Biblical imagery so that Adam ‘tried to hang himself in the orchard’ like Judas’, Adam ‘smashes a chair on [the serpent’s] head’ rather than bruising it with his heel, and God says ‘I am well pleased’ at the spectacle of drunkenness, lust and jealous violence, rather than at the baptism of Christ. In all these poems the reader is provoked to question the orthodox opposition of God and Satan, in a manner obviously influenced by Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. We have seen Crow as the embodiment of creaturely instinct and energy, and as the instigator of mischievous interference in the Biblical creation. He is also a baffled, rudimentary consciousness rather like Wodwo and Gog. In ‘The Black Beast’ he rampages destructively around the universe in search of the beast that is obviously himself; in ‘Crow on the Beach’ he listens to the roar of the sea and the ‘utmost gaping of brain in his tiny skull’ is just enough for him to wonder ‘What could be hurting so much?’ In ‘Crow Tyrannosaurus’ he is horrified by the predatory reality of birds, cats, dogs and man (‘a walking/ Abattoir/ Of innocents—/ His brain incinerating their outcry’) and wonders if he should ‘stop eating/ And try to become the light?’ Rudimentary his consciousness may seem, but the projection of one’s own darkness onto something exter-

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nal, pathetic fallacy and futile revulsion at one’s own animal nature are all very human characteristics. Crow does not live only in the Biblical world. There are no temporal boundaries in the book, and its world includes lace panties, laundromats, skyscrapers, and wallpaper as well as God and the serpent. Above all it is a world that includes modern warfare. Written between 1966 and 1969 Crow is very much a product of its decade: Crow may be indestructible but he lives in an apocalyptic world of ‘brains in hands’ and ‘legs in a treetop’ (‘Crow’s Account of the Battle’—images from Hiroshima), where ‘the demolition is total’ and only ‘Mutations—at home in the nuclear glare’ survive (‘Notes for a Little Play’). The unique flavour of Crow is the way in which it draws on archaic narrative motifs such as Trickster mythology and Biblical myths, in order to reflect on a world that is absolutely contemporary. Crow is a very masculine figure, and in poems such as ‘Crow’s First Lesson’, ‘Lovesong’ and ‘The Lovepet’ sexual love offers little consolation or delight. One of the more puzzling aspects of Hughes’s account of the underlying story, when we try to relate it to the poems, is that Crow is supposed to be searching for his female creator, whom he repeatedly fails to recognise and destroys. There are, it is true, a number of poems in Crow that feature a mother-figure, but only one of these is in New Selected Poems. This poem, ‘Revenge Fable’, is not in my opinion one of the best, but it does make explicit an important ideological element in Crow. In this poem a man tries to ‘get rid of his mother’ whom he eventually ‘Obliterate[s] with disgusts/ Bulldozers and detergents/ Requisitions and central heating ...’ When the mother finally dies the man’s ‘head fell off like a leaf’. Such a clear and harsh vision of the destructive impact of modern life on the natural environment was far less familiar in 1970 than it is today. The crime of a male protagonist against a female victim who is partly an embodiment of nature will be an important element in Hughes’s most ambitious works of the 1970s. 3.5 Cave Birds

Cave Birds is Hughes’s first full-scale collaboration with a visual artist, in this case the American Leonard Baskin. A series of drawings by Baskin inspired

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Hughes to produce a narrative sequence of poems: Baskin was in turn inspired to do more drawings and eventually the result was a book-length sequence of twenty-nine poems, nearly every one of which had an accompanying drawing. In New Selected Poems Cave Birds is dated 1975, when it was performed at the Ilkley Festival, and a limited edition of ten poems and drawings was published, but the complete sequence wasn’t published until 1978. Unfortunately the original work with the Baskin drawings has never been reprinted, which means that a remarkably original and successful collaboration is little known, and one of Hughes’s most important works cannot be read in its proper context. Hughes sometimes spoke of Cave Birds as a continuation of Crow, but it is written in a very different, more ornate and solemn style, and unlike Crow it is a coherent narrative sequence. The narrative cannot be constructed from the poems in New Selected, but unlike the Crow narrative it is simple and coherent, and it does help to make sense of the poems. The protagonist’s complacent existence is interrupted by a scream (‘The Scream’) which inaugurates a trial at which he is accused of crimes against a female victim. He is sentenced to death (‘The Executioner’, ‘The Knight’), descends into the underworld (‘A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement’, ‘The Guide’) and is resurrected to a union with his victim (‘His Legs Ran About’, ‘Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days’) and a transformed existence (‘The Risen’). Bird imagery is dominant throughout the sequence: the protagonist begins as a cockerel, is transformed into a crow and finally into a falcon (‘The Risen’), while the Executioner is a raven and the Knight is a bird’s decomposing corpse. In some cases, such as ‘The Executioner’, the bird imagery is not explicit in the poem but obvious in the Baskin drawing. Cave Birds includes some of Hughes’s finest poems, whose quality can be appreciated with little or no information about their background. ‘The Executioner’ for example sustains a powerful but simple idea—the withdrawal of life as a positive ‘filling up’ with darkness—by means of inventive variations of rhythm and imagery, from the Biblical to the surrealistic. The encroachment of death on the expiring consciousness is brilliantly evoked in the lines, The tap drips darkness darkness Sticks to the soles of your feet.

‘The Knight’ hinges on the poignant paradox of superimposing the language of chivalry on a description of a dead bird. The Knight ‘Has conquered’ by having

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‘surrendered everything’: his conquest is the acceptance of death, and this is one of the finest poems ever written on this subject. The poem interweaves the language of chivalry—‘steel’, ‘trophies’, ‘courtly’, ‘warrior’—with that of religion—‘altar’, ‘submission’, ‘vigil’, ‘chapel’—the natural world—‘wild stones’, ‘roots’, ‘Skylines’, ‘winds’—and above all the body of the bird—‘spine’, ‘wingbones’, ‘talons’, ‘skull’. It builds a quiet rhythm of acceptance, endowing the processes of decomposition with a strange beauty: Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him, Earth itself unravels him from beneath.

‘Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days’ is in a similar style to the Crow poems ‘Lovesong’ and ‘The Lovepet’. Like them it is an accretive narrative of sexual relationship, alternating between ‘he’ and ‘she’. Indeed, Hughes has confusingly presented ‘Bride and Groom’ (for example in the recording of Crow) as itself a Crow poem, part of a sequence including ‘Lovesong’ and ‘The Lovepet’, in which Crow has to carry a hag across a river while answering her questions. ‘Lovesong’ is his attempt to answer the first question, ‘Who paid most, him or her’, and ‘Bride and Groom’ the last, ‘Who gave most, him or her?’ Thus it can be seen that there is a progression from the most painful to the most fulfilling aspects of love. ‘Bride and Groom’ does this originally, and for Hughes surprisingly, by portraying the lovers’ attention to each other in terms of the devoted assembly of a piece of machinery: ‘And he has fashioned her new hips/ With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled’. ‘The Risen’, the last poem in the sequence apart from a brief epilogue, portrays the resurrected and transformed protagonist as a falcon. This poem memorably evokes the way a bird of prey changes the atmosphere whenever it appears: ‘Where he alights/ A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.’ But it concludes enigmatically, ‘But when will he land/ On a man’s wrist.’ One of Hughes’s earliest poems, not included in New Selected, ‘The Dove Breeder’, ends with the image of a man at one with his animal energies: ‘Now he rides the morning mist/ With a big-eyed hawk on his fist.’ This creative harnessing which is not repression is one way of thinking about Hughes’s project throughout many of  Crow, Penguin Audiobooks, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997

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the poems I have been discussing, including most obviously giving the hawk a human voice in ‘Hawk Roosting’. The conclusion of ‘The Risen’ seems to imply that accomplishing this feat remains forever tantalisingly out of reach. In the words of the Epilogue to Cave Birds, ‘At the end of the ritual/ up comes a goblin.’ 3.6 Season Songs

Throughout his career Hughes wrote for children: poetry, stories and plays. His earliest children’s poetry, Meet My Folks!, and his last, The Mermaid’s Purse, are both for very young children, but in the middle of his career he wrote several books for older children. Poems from two of these books, Season Songs and What is the Truth?, are included in New Selected Poems. Season Songs was another collaboration with Leonard Baskin, who contributed several beautiful watercolour illustrations. Unfortunately these were only included in the American edition, but unlike the drawings in Cave Birds they are merely illustrations, not integral parts of the work. The jacket of the first British edition states that the poems are ‘intended primarily for young readers’, but Hughes, when introducing them on the radio, said more ambiguously that he wanted to keep ‘within the hearing of children’. Season Songs, published in a trade edition in 1976, was the first book of Hughes since Crow to be widely available, and was greeted with relief by many readers who had found Crow unacceptably harsh and ugly. It is the most straightforwardly lyrical of Hughes’s collections, introducing an element that will recur in books for adults such as River and Flowers and Insects. The address to children is immediately apparent in the reassuring anthropomorphism of the opening lines of ‘A March Calf’: ‘Right from the start he is dressed in his best—his blacks and his whites/ Little Fauntleroy’. However, the reader who seems to be addressed in those lines might be puzzled by these from the fifth stanza: ‘A little syllogism/ With a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God’s thumb.’ The finest poems in Season Songs, however, belong in any selection of Hughes’s best. I would pick out two in particular: ‘Swifts’ and ‘A Cranefly in September’. These poems exemplify the advice Hughes gives in Poetry in the  Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, p. 195

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Making: ‘You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words.’ If anything, they exemplify it better than Hughes’s earlier animal poems because they are more purely focused on the creatures in their own right: if there is a concession to the young reader it is that Hughes suspends his customary investment in the animal as objective correlative for powers within the human observer. Consider the way the grounded young swift is transformed, when the speaker tosses him up, from ‘bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails/ Like a broken toy’ to ‘suddenly he flowed away under/ His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power’. Or the extraordinary precision of the imagery in ‘A Cranefly in September’: Her jointed bamboo fuselage, Her lobster shoulders, and her face Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache, And the simple colourless church windows of her wings and the pathos of the beautiful, crafted creature’s inevitable death: ‘every perfected vestment/ Is already superfluous.’ 3.7 Gaudete

Of all Hughes’s books of poetry, Gaudete is the one that is least possible to appreciate or understand from the selection in New Selected Poems. Gaudete is a book-length narrative poem that is deeply influenced by Hughes’s reading of Shamanism and The White Goddess. In it he tries to imagine someone practising the role of a shaman in a conventional rural English community. What he imagines is a violent catastrophe, which has been described as ‘The Archers scripted by Charles Manson’. The central character, Nicholas Lumb, is an unmarried Anglican priest who undergoes what—if we were applying the criteria of realism—we would call a psychological breakdown. He encounters a dying halfhuman half-animal woman served by violent aboriginal men who try to get him to cure her. When he fails he is beaten unconscious and replaced by a double  Poetry in the Making, p. 18  The title is Latin for ‘Rejoice’, and comes from a medieval religious song revived by the folk band Steeleye Span, about the birth of Christ. This is at least partly ironic, since Lumb aims to impregnate all the women in the parish by telling them that they will give birth to a saviour.

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made out of a log. This double supplants him in the world and interprets the vicar’s pastoral function in a frenziedly Dionysiac way: he seduces all the women in his parish and turns the Women’s Institute into a coven where he conducts rituals in which they dance in animal costume under the hallucinatory influence of fly agaric mushrooms. At one of these meetings one of these women kills another and herself, and the narrative concludes with the men of the parish hunting Lumb down and murdering him. It is a powerful, often magnificently written, but bewildering story. Why should Hughes, who seems to have such a positive conception of the role of the shaman, write such a negative version of it? One answer to this question might be to recall that in his essay Hughes’s modern western equivalent of the shaman is not the priest but the poet, and this is where the poems in New Selected come in. At the end of the book, after the substitute Lumb’s death, the original man returns with a notebook of verses which are the record, or outcome, of his experiences while his double usurped him. In psychological terms they are, of course, the same man: the two Lumbs represent different aspects—the inner and the outer, perhaps—of the same experience. The extracts in New Selected Poems are all from the ‘Epilogue’ to Gaudete, which consists mainly of forty-five short poems supposedly written by this original Lumb. Hughes’s stylistic model is a form of Indian devotional poetry called vacanas (see Appendix 2), of which he wrote numerous imitations before he composed most of the ones in the book. According to the ‘Argument’ to Gaudete Lumb’s poems are addressed to ‘a nameless female deity’. The style of these poems, and the persona of the speaker, contrast strongly with the narrative. The narrative style is headlong and vehement with long, loose lines, sometimes shifting into prose, and the character of Lumb is for the most part unreflective and priapic. The speaker of the epilogue poems by contrast is chastened and meditative, and the style naturally corresponds. Hughes has said that he constructed the figure of the goddess out of a number of women he had known, and specified that the poem ‘I know well’ was about a young woman who died of Hodgkins’ disease. This is one of the most successful and moving  Hodgkin’s disease is a form of cancer, and the young woman who inspired the poem is Susan Allison. Hughes wrote a memoir of her which was posthumously published in a 50th anniversary second number of St Botolph’s Review.

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of the poems. In general, however, their effect is cumulative, and is certainly enhanced by the contrast with the narrative. 3.8 Remains of Elmet

Remains of Elmet is the result of Hughes’s second highly successful collaboration with a visual artist, this time the photographer Fay Godwin. Godwin took a series of brooding, meditative and atmospheric photographs of the area around Hughes’s birthplace in West Yorkshire, and over a period of about a year the two of them worked closely together. Often there is a close correspondence between poem and photograph, but even when there is not a direct connection the visions of the two artists complement each other. However, Hughes was dissatisfied with the ensuing volume published in 1979. He regretted not having written a more directly autobiographical book, and spoke of them disparagingly as impersonal pieces of writing that merely created a mood. This comment is especially interesting because it was made at the end of his life, when his attitude to autobiographical poetry had changed as a result of writing and publishing Birthday Letters. By the time New Selected Poems came out, Hughes had published another volume titled Elmet, and here the textual history of the poems becomes complicated. Elmet includes several poems first collected in Wolfwatching, including ‘Telegraph Wires’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘For the Duration’ and ‘Walt’. Most of these are poems about people, and their inclusion in Elmet is clearly an attempt to correct what Hughes felt to be the excessive impersonality of the original volume. Additionally, ‘Leaf Mould’ and ‘Chinese History of Colden Water’ were published in Elmet as drastically revised versions of poems that appeared under different titles in Remains of Elmet. Remains of Elmet is in some ways Hughes’s most historical book. ‘Elmet’, as he points out in his preface, is the name of the Celtic kingdom that once flourished in that region, and was the last to hold out against the Romans. More recently agriculture and industry—woollen mills—had dominated the area, and the poems frequently evoke the ruined remnants of these activities. There is also, not surprisingly, the brooding memory of the First World War. Hughes’s ambition  Letter to Keith Sagar, 14 October 1998, British Library

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to write a more personal account of the region—an equivalent to Wordsworth’s Prelude or ‘growth of a poet’s mind’—can be seen in ‘Leaf Mould’, in which he fuses the influence of his mother’s voice, and her grieving memory of those lost in the war, with that of the natural environment. ‘You’ in this poem is the poet himself: You were her step-up transformer. She grieved for her girlhood and the fallen. You mourned for Paradise and its fable.

The decline of industry and the collapse of its buildings back into the land, however, allows Hughes to imagine a return of that Paradise in ‘Chinese History of Colden Water’: a ‘fallen immortal’ falls asleep in the valley, his dreams are troubled by ‘a migraine of headscarves ... clog-irons and biblical texts’, but when he wakes the ‘Chapels, chimneys, roofs in the mist’ are ‘scattered’ and he can hear only ‘the laughter of foxes.’ As we have seen, the fox is Hughes’s totem animal (Section 1.4), and this imagined laughter is not just that of creatures out in the natural world, but of that inner self that appeared to Hughes in his dream of the burnt fox. The same theme is handled in a different way in ‘The Long Tunnel Ceiling’, one of the few poems in which Hughes did succeed in providing a glimpse of autobiography. The canal with its water drawn from ‘High under ferns’ crossed by the road bridge carrying ‘Wools and cottons’ between the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, is a perfect metaphor for the conflicting principles in the child’s life, and his sudden realisation that the ‘brick’ supposedly dislodged from the tunnel ceiling by the traffic is in fact a trout, ‘Holy of holies’, is at once a natural incident and a symbolic awakening, worthy of comparison with the ‘spots of time’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude. One poem that is difficult to understand without the Godwin photograph is ‘Heptonstall Old Church’. This church is in fact a ruin, a skeleton left when the church burned down. This provides Hughes with his image of the ‘giant bones’, which become a metaphor for the declining influence of Christianity. The poem’s representation of the influence of Christianity is highly ambivalent: ‘Its song put a light in the valleys/ And harness on the long moors’—an apparently creative influence—but when it died ‘the moorland broke loose’, a phrase redolent of the

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liberation of natural energy, and the recovery of Hughes’s ‘Paradise’. 3.9 Moortown Diary

This collection is dated 1979 in New Selected Poems, but the poems were written between 1973 and 1976, when Hughes was working on a farm with his father-inlaw. They were first published in 1978 as Moortown Elegies (a limited edition), then as the title sequence of the 1979 compendium volume Moortown (which also included Earth-Numb and Prometheus on his Crag). The title Moortown Diary wasn’t used till they were reprinted in 1989: this was the first time the poems were published with dates. Moortown Diary has a unique and important place in Hughes’s oeuvre. The 1989 reprint has a Preface in which he describes these pieces as ‘casual journal notes’, which he wrote down, usually the same day as the incident recorded, ‘partly with the idea of maybe using them at some future time in a piece of writing’. However, when he tried to revise them he found that he destroyed what he felt was valuable in them—their ‘souvenir bloom’. Study of the drafts of these poems shows that most of them are, indeed, almost uncorrected. This is, apparently, a different phenomenon from the instances I mentioned earlier (Section 3.2), such as ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘An Otter’, when a poem seemed to come to him instantly. He is in no doubt that those are really poems, and their composition is a rare and miraculous instantaneous access to the inner source from which the thought-fox emerged. In most of the poems in Moortown Diary what he calls ‘the poetic process’ has not begun and, most unusually for Hughes, he implies that that process was destructive of what he valued in these texts. Their importance is that, although they are not in any meaningful sense ‘confessional’—they reveal little about Hughes beyond his practice as a farmer—they are straightforwardly autobiographical, and are perhaps part of the process that led to the composition of Birthday Letters, which he also regarded as lacking the ‘niceties that any poetry workshop student could have helped me to.’ Another important aspect of Moortown Diary is the change in the relationship between the human speaker and the animals in the poems. They were writ Moortown Diary, pp. x–xi  Letter to Keith Sagar, 18 July 1998, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 720

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ten at the same time as Season Songs and, as in those poems, the animals are not portrayed as symbols of the speaker’s inner self. Perhaps because they are not wild but domestic animals, and he is a farmer, the emphasis is on their suffering and his attempts, often unavailing, to help them. In ‘Rain’ the calves ‘look up, through plastered forelocks,/ Without moving’ because ‘Nowhere they can go/ Is less uncomfortable.’ In ‘Bringing in New Couples’ ‘the numbing snow-wind blows on the blood tatters’ of the newly delivered ewe’s ‘breached back-end.’ In the most celebrated of these poems, ‘February 17th’, Hughes is forced to deliver a still-born lamb by cutting off its head. This poem memorably combines visceral detail—‘I felt inside,/ Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery/ Muscled tunnel’—with resonant images of archetypal struggle: [I] pushed The neck-stump 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 vertebra were deadlock, A to-fro futility.

Hughes has found a plain but eloquent language that could be that of an articulate farmer: again this language lends authority to the speaker. In Moortown Diary the human protagonist is not diminished by the animals he encounters; on the contrary, there is a muted heroism about the figure of the farmer. This is true of Hughes as farming protagonist; it is even more true of Jack Orchard, his fatherin-law, who is memorialised in ‘The Day He Died’ and ‘A Memory’. These read more like what Hughes would call ‘poems’ than the majority of Moortown Diary: as is appropriate to their subject, they are considered, reflective assessments of a life rather than on-the-spot records of an incident, and unlike most of the poems they are not dated, suggesting that they were written over a period. ‘A Memory’ vividly evokes Jack Orchard’s ‘suddenly savage, suddenly gentle/ Masterings of the animal’—a remarkable choice of verb in a poet for whom the animal world is usually to be learned from rather than mastered. Equally striking—and moving—is the last stanza of ‘The Day He Died’, where for once the man is portrayed as a necessary part of the natural world:

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From now on the land Will have to manage without him. But it hesitates, in this slow realisation of light, Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun, With roots cut And a great blank in its memory.

The verse imitates the hesitation of the land, poignantly suggesting that the speaker is similarly hesitant, and will also have to find a way to ‘manage without him.’ 3.10 River

As we have seen in Pike (Section 2.2), Hughes was a devoted fisherman from an early age and, as Poetry in the Making shows, he thought fishing was an appropriate analogy for the kind of thinking required by poetic composition. As he grew older his attachment to fishing became increasingly passionate. In an interview published after his death he said, ‘I would never stop fishing, because I do not want to lose what goes with fishing ... this last connection. To this whole—to everything. The stuff of the Earth. The whole of life.’ The most vivid poetic account of this ‘connection’ is perhaps in the title-poem of the ‘Earth-Numb’ sequence, written a little earlier than River but part of the same inspiration: Something terrified and terrifying Gleam-surges to and fro through me From the river to the sky, from the sky into the river Uprooting dark bedrock, shatters it in air, Cartwheels across me, slices thudding through me As if I were the current.

Like Cave-Birds and Remains of Elmet, River was originally a collaboration with an artist, the Devon photographer Peter Keen. All three sequences were reprinted without the illustrations in a volume titled Three Books (1993). Unlike the other two sequences, River is not diminished by this publication, since Keen’s colour photographs are distracting and rarely relevant to the poems: there is not,  ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Thomas Pero, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Vol. 5 no.2, Winter 1999, p. 56

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as in Cave Birds and Remains of Elmet, the sense of a symbiotic relationship between two artists feeding off each other’s vision. In fact, Hughes revised and improved several of the River poems for Three Books, so if you want to read the whole sequence this (or Collected Poems) is a better source than the original volume. At least four of the poems in River are among Hughes’s greatest, and I shall concentrate on these. It will be obvious from the way Hughes writes about fishing that there is a close connection between this experience and his belief in the shamanic nature of the poet. Fishing is a way, perhaps the most important way, in which he gets ‘this last connection’ to the spirit-life of nature. In the longest poem in River, ‘The Gulkana’, Hughes makes his most developed exploration of this connection. The Gulkana is a river in Alaska on which Hughes fished for salmon. As he walks along the shore of the river the speaker starts to feel afraid, as if he is being ‘hunted’. We might recall the fear of the young fisherman in ‘Pike’, and the way the hunter becomes the hunted in that poem, by the dreamfish that ‘rose slowly towards me, watching.’ In the Gulkana, similarly, the fear is of ‘one inside me’. He becomes aware of a ‘doppelgänger’ who exultingly recognises the river as his home, and to whom the speaker is ‘the interloper,/ The fool he had always hated.’ ‘The Gulkana’ is one of the poems that Hughes most extensively revised in the early ’90s. At the same time he wrote an essay on T. S. Eliot, who had increasingly become, for Hughes, the epitome of the shaman poet, at least in the twentieth century. This essay is titled ‘The Poetic Self’, by which Hughes means another ‘more or less articulate personality hidden inside’ the ego, a ‘doppelgänger’. Similarly, the ‘doppelgänger’ in ‘The Gulkana’ is Hughes’s poetic or shamanic self. Under the influence of this other the speaker becomes possessed by the ‘voice’ of the river which he associates with its alien-sounding, Native American name, ‘a deranging cry/ From the wilderness’. As the salmon surge upstream they too seem ‘possessed/ By that voice in the river’: And they rose and sank Like voices, themselves like singers In its volume. We watched them, deepening away. They looked like what they were, somnambulists,  ‘The Poetic Self’, Winter Pollen, pp. 274–5

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Drugged, ritual victims, melting away Towards a sacrament— a consummation That could only be death.

This is a complex and disturbing passage. Hughes’s doppelgänger, himself a menacing figure, takes over his consciousness and grants him a share in the ‘possessed’ life of the salmon. This is a vision of fulfilment—‘deepening’ towards a ‘consummation’—but also sinister, ‘Drugged, ritual victims’. The ritual victim is sacrificed for a religious communion in which he, supposedly, shares, but it is notable that Hughes chooses such a sinister metaphor for the apparently willing ‘melting’ of the salmon towards death: he doesn’t sentimentalise the process, or shirk its repellent aspects. ‘That Morning’ is another poem set in Alaska. Although Hughes travelled fairly extensively, Alaska is the only foreign place that inspired him to notable achievement in poetry. In a letter to his brother he described it as ‘paradise’, and this may be the key to its importance to him, for his personal paradise had been his early free life on the moors with Gerald. This poem has none of the fearful and sinister elements of ‘The Gulkana’, but it powerfully and beautifully evokes the sensation, and the spiritual dimension, of immersion in the natural world: Solemn to stand there in the pollen light Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed As from the hand of God. There the body Separated, golden and imperishable, From its doubting thought.

It is not so much the words ‘Solemn’ and ‘God’ that convey the profundity of this experience—or, rather, those words are made meaningful by the way, especially in the second line quoted, the body of the poetry is itself saturated by the movement and sensation it describes. The predominance of semivowel, sibilant and nasal in the spondaic stresses produces a soft, surging movement, and the interweaving of alliteration and assonance binds the words into a whole suggestive of massive, mobile fluidity. In this poem there is none of the tension that usually afflicts the human consciousness exposed to what Hughes called ‘the elemental power-circuit of the

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Universe.’ One might say that the speaker here is the ‘golden body’ freed from ‘doubting thought’, a precondition for Hughes’s ‘paradise’. The poem’s conclusion, in which ‘gold bears came down and swam like men ... and dived like children ... Eating pierced salmon off their talons’ while the speaker and his companion stand ‘Among creatures of light’, themselves transformed into ‘creatures of light’, is the most paradisal moment in Hughes’s oeuvre. There is however an incongruous moment at the beginning of the poem, when Hughes is reminded of ‘the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire/ Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters’. A note to this poem in Three Books says this is ‘simply a memory of South Yorkshire from a late phase of the Second World War.’ This note doesn’t explain anything: why should such a memory occur here? South Yorkshire was where Hughes’s family moved when his ‘paradise’ with Gerald came to an end, and Gerald himself joined the RAF. The apparently incongruous image is in fact a reminder of the loss of that early world, which has been briefly regained in remote Alaska. The usurpation of the speaker by the doppelgänger in ‘The Gulkana’ and the liberation of the ‘golden body’ from ‘doubting thought’ in ‘That Morning’ are instances, one menacing and the other paradisal, of Hughesian loss of ego. ‘Go Fishing’ addresses itself directly to this concept. Or rather, it addresses the reader imperatively, evoking the ego-free state at the same time as commanding it. The addressee (who is course the speaker as well as the reader—the poem is at least partly self-addressed) is told to ‘Be supplanted ... Displaced ... Dissolved ... Dismembered.’ The verbs are all passive, and the poem is one of the most explicit instances of the narrative of usurpation I have described (See Section 2.2). Like ‘That Morning’, the poem succeeds because its own language embodies the process: Join water, wade in underbeing Let brain mist into moist earth Ghost loosen away downstream Gulp river and gravity

Here the effect of spondaic metre combined with assonance and alliteration is  Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p. 200  Three Books, p. 186  In spondaic metre, adjacent syllables are equally stressed, as in ‘Join wa[ter]’, ‘moist earth’.

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one of dissolution. Words melt into each other, as in the echoing chains: water/ wade/being/brain; mist/moist/ghost/loosen; ghost/gulp/river/gravity. The whole effect is enhanced by the absence of punctuation. Much of the strength of the poems in River derives from Hughes’s profound knowledge of the behaviour of fish, especially salmon, and a sequence following the life-cycle of the salmon is at the heart of the volume. In these poems Hughes seeks to represent imaginatively how salmon come to be such sensitive glands in the vast, dishevelled body of nature. Their moody behaviour, so unpredictable and mysterious, is attuned, with the urgency of survival, to every slightest hint of the weather—marvellous instruments, recording every moment-by-moment microchange as the moving air and shifting light manipulate the electronics of the water molecules.

The most outstanding of these poems is ‘October Salmon’. This poem brings to us the salmon at the end of his life, probably in the same pool he was born in, now ‘death-patched’, ‘His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body/ A fungoid anemone of canker.’ But it also recalls ‘the splendour of the sea ... the eye of ravenous joy ... the savage amazement of life,/ The salt mouthful of actual existence’ in this same fish’s ocean-wandering. Like ‘The Knight’ in Cave-Birds, ‘October Salmon’ combines the image of a creature with chivalric imagery, but it is as it were a reversal of ‘The Knight’: in that poem the chivalric image is in the foreground and we read the image of the dead bird through it; here, the fish is in the foreground, but words such as ‘death-patched hero’, ‘regimentals, her badges and decorations’, ‘vigil’ and ‘epic’ are not merely decoration. They serve the bold but utterly convincing representation of the fish as a heroic life-adventurer whose life ends, in a beautifully apt phrase, as an epic poise That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient In the machinery of Heaven.

 Rain-Charm for the Duchy, p. 52

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3.11 Wolfwatching

Wolfwatching is a miscellaneous collection, but the most interesting poems in it are part of what Hughes called ‘a correction of the over-determined plan’ of Remains of Elmet’, by including more personal material. Several of these poems were subsequently incorporated into Elmet. This project was rather abortive, Hughes never thoroughly revised Remains of Elmet, and Elmet is a hotchpotch of a few new poems, reprinted and revised poems from Remains, and some Calder Valley-related poems opportunistically recycled from earlier volumes. However, Wolfwatching does mark a new direction in Hughes’s work. In New Selected Poems there are two poems (‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Walt’) about the author’s uncles, one of whom committed suicide and the other was wounded in the trenches, and two (‘For the Duration’ and ‘Dust As We Are’) about his father’s war experience. In the original volume there are also two poems about his mother (one, ‘Leaf-Mould’, is confusingly included in the Remains of Elmet section of New Selected) and several others about the region and his early life there. There is a stronger anecdotal element in these poems than is typical with Hughes, an interest in representing the vernacular speech of the people he grew up with, and a greater attention to the material details and social circumstances of the world they shared. The most outstanding of these poems is ‘Dust As We Are’. This poem takes its title from Wordsworth’s Prelude which, as I have said earlier (Section 3.8) Hughes may have been emulating: Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements ....

After another account of the oppressive effect his father’s war trauma had on his childhood—‘I was his supplementary convalescent’—Hughes’s poem ends, So the soul grew. A strange thing, with rickets—a hyena.  Poetry Book Society Bulletin 142, Autumn 1989, p. 1  William Wordsworth, The Prelude [1850], Book 1, l. 340

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No singing—that kind of laughter.

Hughes had several things in common with Wordsworth, notably the importance of childhood experience and a religious awareness of nature in their poetic formation. However, the quotation from Wordsworth in his title is surely ironic. Hughes’s soul did not grow ‘like harmony in music’ but discordantly, the elements never reconciled. Nevertheless the tone of ‘Dust As We Are is not wholly bitter, and it includes his tenderest writing about his father: I divined, With a comb, Under his wavy, golden hair, as I combed it, The fragility of skull. And I filled With his knowledge.

The wavy golden hair implies an appearance of youthful vigour that I don’t find elsewhere in Hughes’s writing about his father—this is the father as the powerful protector, to be emulated by the son. But the son, in a resonant word, ‘divined’ what Eliot called ‘the skull beneath the skin’, a fragility the more poignant because of the threats it was exposed to in the war, and this is the father, not the golden-haired youth, from whom the boy inherits. 3.12 Uncollected Poems

The poems gathered together as ‘Uncollected’ at the end of New Selected Poems are further evidence of the new autobiographical tendency in Hughes’s work. The first three could easily belong in Wolfwatching: more poems about his mother and father, and one about an aunt. ‘Anniversary’ is a particularly beautiful poem about his mother’s spiritual relationship with her sister who died aged eighteen. She was frequently visited by this sister’s ghost which, she said, eventually ‘turned into an angel’. Hughes would certainly have considered that his mother had shamanic gifts. However, the most important of the ‘Uncollected’ are the sixteen that followed ‘Anniversary’ in New Selected: from ‘Chaucer’ to ‘The Error’. With two excep T. S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, Selected Poems  ‘The Deadfall’, Difficulties of a Bridegroom, p. 3. ‘The Deadfall’ is a short story which Hughes has said was based on his own experience (p. ix).

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tions these poems are intimately addressed in the second person to someone who seems in some way doomed. To readers who know anything about Hughes’s life it is obvious that the first eight of these are about his relationship with Sylvia Plath: they were all collected three years later in Birthday Letters. This was to be one of the most sensational publishing events of the decade: at last Hughes had broken his silence about a passage of his life that was both a personal tragedy and the cause of much public vilification. But there was no such excitement about the publication of these eight poems in New Selected Poems. It may be, indeed, that Hughes was ‘testing the waters’, and that the lack of public furore emboldened him to publish the book. They are of course presented very differently here than in Birthday Letters, tucked away in ‘Uncollected Poems’ and in an undivided sequence with another eight similarly addressed poems, beginning with ‘The Other’. Are these poems also addressed to Plath? Very few people indeed would have known that most of this second group had been published five years earlier in a very expensive limited edition of only fifty copies, titled Capriccio, or that they are addressed to Assia Wevill. Hughes cannot suppress the autobiographical significance of the Plath poems entirely, but by presenting them in this way he stifles it as much as possible. ‘Chaucer’ is unusual among the Birthday Letters poems in that it presents a vivid portrait of Plath comparatively unshadowed by hindsight. Her flamboyant, almost out-of-control gestures as she recites Chaucer to a herd of cows are on the borderline of spontaneity and affectation. Hughes narrates this episode with obvious affection, though both he and she must have been aware that her performance had a literary precedent, in Gudrun Brangwen’s dancing to a herd of cattle in Chapter 15 of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. The Birthday Letters poems are highly allusive. This is a story already told, in biographies mostly hostile to Hughes, and in Plath’s own writing. ‘The Earthenware Head’, ‘Black Coat’ and ‘The Tender Place’ all refer directly to poems by Plath: ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’, ‘Man in Black’ and ‘The Hanging Man’ respectively. ‘Black Coat’ revisits an episode recorded in Plath’s poem ‘Man in Black’, written in 1959 when they were in Boston. Hughes’s words, ‘Watching me/ Pin the sea’s edge down’ echo Plath’s, ‘riveting stones, air,/ All of it, together’: although the poem is narrated from his point of view, he draws on Plath’s poem for her perspective. But the real significance of ‘Man

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in Black’ is Plath’s later allusion to it in ‘Daddy’ (written after their separation), where the hero of the earlier poem, and the rivets that image his power to create wholeness, are transformed into ‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw.’ When she met Hughes Plath openly confessed that he replaced her dead father: this identification takes a sinister turn in ‘Daddy’, where the psychological torment that the speaker suffered because of her father’s early death is merged with the betrayal of her now vilified husband. In ‘Black Coat’ Hughes reads ‘Daddy’ back into Plath’s earlier poem (which doesn’t mention Plath’s father) by imagining that her ‘dead father had just crawled’ out of the sea at that moment, and ‘slid into me’. ‘Black Coat’ is typical of one strong tendency of Birthday Letters: the revisiting, with hindsight, of earlier episodes of their life together, with the strong implication that the tragic outcome was inevitable. ‘You Hated Spain’ is typical in another way. It is possible to read quite a lot of Birthday Letters as selfregarding assertions of Hughes’s superiority to Plath in terms of insight and spiritual strength. Such a reading would be misguided, however. ‘You Hated Spain’, which refers to the period of their honeymoon, begins, ‘Spain frightened you. Spain/ Where I felt at home.’ There is something raw, elemental and deathly about Spain which appeals to Hughes’s imagination, whereas Plath recoils from it as ‘a bobby-sox American’. However, Hughes is merely setting himself up here. As in a number of other poems in Birthday Letters, what seems to be his greater insight turns out to be his blindness. Spain frightened Plath not because it was an offence to her prissy American upbringing but because it was ‘the land of your dreams’: she was, in reality, far more intimate with ‘the dust-red cadaver’ and ‘the puckering amputations’ than her husband, whose feeling of comfort in Spain is by comparison that of a tourist.

Part 4: Reception Perhaps the earliest recorded response to Hughes’s poetry is Sylvia Plath’s journal record of the party at which she met him: ‘huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words ... strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders.’ These are the words of a woman who was falling in love with the poet, but the connotations of violence and rugged masculinity, and the close association of the literary characteristics of the poetry with the supposed personal characteristics of Hughes himself, were to be persistent motifs of the reception of his work. Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), was very well received, and he rapidly became a recognised figure on the literary scene. The Times praised his ‘brilliance and variety’, the Manchester Guardian spoke of ‘the emergence of a major poet’ and the American poet W. S. Merwin detected ‘a capacity for incantation ... combined with an ear, a sense of form and development, and a poetic intelligence, all of a high order.’ Even at this very early stage of his critical reputation, the word ‘violence’ became attached to his poetry: the distinguished Scottish poet Edwin Muir spoke of his ‘admirable violence’ and the Sunday Times of ‘smouldering emotional violence’. Although these were intended as favourable comments, ‘violence’ became an albatross around Hughes’s neck, and a focus for the perception that his hostility to the rational, materialistic culture of progress was fundamentally barbaric and even fascistic. Lupercal (1960) was even more enthusiastically received: it possibly had the best reviews of any of Hughes’s books, and several poems from it remain among the most popular favourites. The most influential poetry reviewer at this time was A. Alvarez, the poetry editor of the Observer, who became a strong advocate of Hughes’s poetry and, later, of Sylvia Plath’s. With Lupercal Alvarez  Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil, London, Faber, 2000, p. 212  Times, 23 January 1958; Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1957; New York Times Book Review, 6 October 1957  New Statesman, 28 September 1957; Sunday Times, 3 November 1957

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announced that Hughes had ‘emerged as a poet of the first importance’. By the time of Wodwo (1967) his status as a major poet, certainly the most important of his generation, was well established: C. B. Cox in the Spectator describes it as ‘undoubtedly one of the great books of the 1960s’. However, the critical response began to be polarised, and the Times Literary Supplement found much of Wodwo ‘unintentionally comic’. This critical polarisation reached its peak with the publication of Crow (1970). The literary biographer Richard Holmes complained in The Times of a ‘brutish metamorphosis coming over Hughes’s linguistic skill’, while in the Times Literary Supplement the poet Ian Hamilton, in possibly the most hostile review Hughes ever received, sneered at Crow as a ‘cosy, unperplexing wallow’. However, the Irish poet Eavan Boland represented a large body of readers when she found these to be ‘poems in the fullest, richest, most assured sense’. Partly because of the controversy surrounding it, the publication of Crow represented the peak of Hughes’s prominence as an innovative, controversial poet. Not until the very different public excitement aroused by Birthday Letters was there such a level of public discussion of his work. From a very early stage Hughes was recognised by academic critics and the educational establishment. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, in the Critical Quarterly, were strong champions from the late 1950s, and they were joined in the 1960s by J. M. Newton in the Cambridge Quarterly. Newton wrote a particularly laudatory review of Crow. By the early ’60s Hughes’s work was regularly studied in school: I remember being set ‘Thrushes’ for critical analysis on an A level paper in 1963. In the 1970s Keith Sagar began his long campaign to get Hughes recognised as the greatest writer of his era. Sagar published a British Council pamphlet on Hughes in 1972, and the full-length critical study The Art of Ted Hughes in 1975. This was followed by books by Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ekbert Faas, Stuart Hirschberg and Thomas West in the early 1980s. Hughes was now firmly established in the canon. However, perhaps as an inevitable consequence of canonicity, Hughes was no longer considered a major force in contemporary poetry. The response to his  Observer, 27 March 1960  Spectator, 27 July 1967; Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967  Cambridge Quarterly vol.5 no.4, 1971, pp. 376–82

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work after Crow did little to enhance his reputation, though a claim for his major status could be based on that body of work alone. Cave Birds was little reviewed, and largely met with incomprehension; Gaudete was surprisingly favourably reviewed, but never lodged in the public imagination as Crow had. The most popular works of the 1970s, unsurprisingly, were Season Songs and Moortown Diary. Hughes’s acceptance of the Poet Laureateship in 1984 perhaps inevitably sealed his fate as a living poet. This establishment position seemed to many readers bewilderingly incongruous for the author of the savage and iconoclastic Crow. The Poet Laureate has always been a target for mockery, and Hughes was no exception, especially when he produced a series of obsequious Birthday Odes for the Queen Mother. The quality of these poems was not sufficient to provoke readers into taking seriously Hughes’s project as Laureate, to celebrate the monarchy as a symbol of the spiritual unity of the nation. His reputation was further, and quite unjustifiably, eroded by the campaign to vilify him for his alleged crimes as the husband of Sylvia Plath. It is however true that, with the exception of a few family poems in Wolfwatching, Hughes published nothing to enhance his reputation as a poet between River (1983) and Tales from Ovid (1997). The Ovid book, which won the Whitbread Prize, is indeed a significant addition to Hughes’s oeuvre, combining narrative verve and fluency with a characteristically intuitive feeling for the mythical material. Finally, of course, Birthday Letters (1998), which again won the Whitbread Prize, completed a remarkable late rehabilitation of Hughes’s reputation. Admittedly, the public interest in Birthday Letters had little to do with its quality as poetry. It is an uneven volume, but there are enough poems that poignantly register an enduring grief and never-healed wound, for Hughes’s late conversion to ‘Confessionalism’ to be judged an important extension of his oeuvre. Hughes’s reputation has remained high since his death. Two sympathetic biographies, by Elaine Feinstein and Diane Middlebrook, have rectified some of the damage done by the more outrageous biographies of Plath, Keith Sagar has added The Laughter of Foxes to his critical work on Hughes, and my own Ted Hughes: A Literary Life is the most comprehensive assessment of his work to date. Hughes’s own work, especially his translations, has continued to be pub-

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lished posthumously, and the compendious Collected Poems came out in 2003. There have been three international conferences devoted to Hughes since his death, and another is planned for 2010.

Part 5: Bibliography 5.1 Works by Ted Hughes 5.1.1 Major books, including translations The Hawk in the Rain, London, Faber, 1957 Lupercal, London, Faber, 1960 Meet My Folks!, London, Faber, 1961 The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, London, Faber, 1963 How the Whale Became, London, Faber, 1963 Nessie the Mannerless Monster, London, Faber, 1964 Recklings, London, Turret Books, 1966 Wodwo, London, Faber, 1967 Poetry in the Making, London, Faber, 1967 The Iron Man, London, Faber, 1968 Seneca’s Oedipus, London, Faber, 1969 Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, London, Faber, 1970 Season Songs, London, Faber, 1976 Earth-Moon, London, Rainbow Press, 1976 Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, New York, Viking, 1976 Selected Poems, János Pilinszky, translated by Ted Hughes and János Csokits, Manchester, Carcanet, 1976 Gaudete, London, Faber, 1977 Cave Birds, London, Faber, 1978 Moon-Bells and Other Poems, London, Chato and Windus, 1978

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Orts, London, Rainbow Press, 1978 Moortown, London, Faber, 1979 Remains of Elmet, London, Faber, 1979 Under the North Star, London, Faber, 1981 A Primer of Birds, Devon, Gehenna Press, 1981 River, London, Faber, 1983 What is the Truth?, London, Faber, 1984 Flowers and Insects, London, Faber, 1986 Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, London, Faber, 1986 The Cat and the Cuckoo, Devon, Sustone Press, 1987 Tales of the Early World, London, Faber, 1988 Wolfwatching, London, Faber, 1989 Moortown Diary, London, Faber, 1989 Capriccio, Devon, Gehenna Press, 1990 A Dancer to God: Tributes to T. S. Eliot, London, Faber, 1992 Rain-Charm for the Duchy, London, Faber, 1992 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London, Faber, 1992 Three Books (Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet, River), London, Faber, 1993 The Mermaid’s Purse, Devon, Sunstone Press, 1993 The Iron Woman, London, Faber, 1993 Winter Pollen, London, Faber, 1994 Difficulties of a Bridegroom, London, Faber, 1994 Elmet, London, Faber, 1994 The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales, London, Faber, 1995 Spring Awakening, London, Faber, 1995 Blood Wedding, London, Faber, 1996 Tales from Ovid, London, Faber, 1997 Birthday Letters, London, Faber, 1998

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Howls and Whispers, Devon, Gehenna Press, 1998 Phèdre, London, Faber, 1998 Alcestis, London, Faber, 1999 The Oresteia, London, Faber, 1999 Collected Plays for Children, London, Faber, 2001 Collected Poems, London, Faber, 2003 Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort, London, Faber, 2006 Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid, London, Faber, 2007 5.1.2 Interviews ‘Desk Poet’, interview with John Horder, The Guardian 23 March 1965 ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’ (1970), Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, pp. 197–208 ‘Ted Hughes: The Art of Poetry LXXI’, interview with Drue Heinz, Paris Review 134, Spring 1995 ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Thomas Pero, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Vol.5 no.2, Winter 1999, pp. 50–57; abridged version in The Guardian Saturday Review, 9 January 1999, pp. 1–2 5.1.3 Recordings Crow, Penguin Audiobooks, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997 5.1.4 Edited Anthologies (With Seamus Heaney) The Rattle Bag, London, Faber, 1982 (With Seamus Heaney) The School Bag, London, Faber, 1997

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5.2 Web Sites Earth-Moon: A Ted Hughes Website: www.earth-moon.org The Ted Hughes Homepage: www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/THHome.htm Centre for Ted Hughes Studies: www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/hughes_index.htm Ted Hughes Centre: http://www.tedhughes.org.uk 5.3 Criticism and Biography Bundtzen, Lynda K., ‘Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s “Burning the Letters”’, Contemporary Literature 33, 1998, p. 437 (Plath’s creative critique of Hughes) Faas, Ekbert, Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press, 1980 (Includes two interviews with Hughes) Feinstein, Elaine, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001 (Rather superficial, but the only full-scale biography) Gammage, Nick, ed., The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, London, Faber, 1999 (Collection of tributes to Hughes) Gifford, Terry and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study, London,Faber, 1981(Thorough critical account of work up to Remains of Elmet) Hirschberg, Stuart, Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes, Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1981 (Especially good chapter on Gaudete) Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes/Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, (1993) London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995 (Excellent and entertaining account of the way Hughes is represented in biographies of Plath) Middlebrook, Diane, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, New York, Viking, 2003 (Excellent, well-balanced account of Plath and Hughes’s relationship) Moulin, Joanny, ed., Lire Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems 1957–1994, Paris, Editions du Temps, 1999 (Essays in both French and English) Moulin, Joanny, ed., Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons, London, Routledge, 2004 (Wide-ranging collection of essays)

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Myers, Lucas, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Sewanee, Proctor’s Hall, 2001 (Memoir by close Cambridge friend of Hughes) Roberts, Neil, Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry, Harlow, Longman, 1999 (Chapters on Crow and Gaudete) Roberts, Neil, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 (The most comprehensive account of Hughes’s literary career) Robinson, Craig, Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989 (Especially good on Moortown Diaries) Sagar, Keith, The Art of Ted Hughes (1975), 2nd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978 (The first and still authoritative critical study) Sagar, Keith, ed., The Achievement of Ted Hughes, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1983 (Wide-ranging collection of essays with 31 uncollected poems. Some of these are omitted from Collected Poems) Sagar, Keith, ed., The Challenge of Ted Hughes, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1994 (Collection of essays mainly focussing on Hughes’s work after Crow.) Sagar, Keith, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000 ((Includes excellent analysis of the composition of a Hughes poem, and lengthy version of the Crow saga) Sagar, Keith and Stephen Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946–1995, London, Mansell, 1998 (Essential for high-level research on Hughes) Scigaj, Leonard M., The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination, University of Iowa Press, 1986 (Informative about mythological and cultural background) Scigaj, Leonard M., ed., Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, New York, G.K. Hall & Co., 1992 (Includes some classic essays across the range of Hughes’s career) 5.4 Other Works Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), London, Arkana, 1989 Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems, London, Faber, 1962

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Graves, Robert, The White Goddess: a historical grammar of poetic myth, 1948, amended and enlarged edition, 1966, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966 Plath, Sylvia, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath, London, Faber, 1975 Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems, London, Faber, 1981 Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil, London, Faber, 2000 Popa, Vasko, Collected Poems 1943–1976, tr. Anne Pennington with an introduction by Ted Hughes, Manchester, Carcanet, 1978 Radin, Paul, The Trickster, Routledge, London, 1956 Ramanujan, A.K., tr., Speaking of Siva, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973 Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘New Poems [1907], tr. Edgar Snow, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984

Part 6: Appendices Appendix 1: Wodwo

Wodwo includes poems written before and after Plath’s death. Several published sources give inaccurate information about the dates of the poems. Of the ones reprinted in New Selected Poems the following were definitely written before Plath’s death: ‘Thistles’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Her Husband’, ‘Public Bar T.V.’, ‘The Green Wolf’, ‘Theology’, ‘Gog’, ‘Out’, ‘New Moon in January’, ‘The Warriors of the North’, ‘Pibroch’, ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, ‘Wodwo’. ‘Song of a Rat’ and ‘The Howling of Wolves’ were certainly written within a few weeks of Plath’s death, and ‘Skylarks’ in 1965 or 66. It isn’t possible to be so certain about other poems, but manuscript evidence suggests that the following were at least significantly revised at a late date: ‘Fern’, ‘Gnat-Psalm’, ‘Kafka’, ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’, ‘The Bear’, ‘Cadenza’. Recklings was a small-press limited edition in which Hughes published poems that he had rejected for Wodwo. Of these ‘Water, ‘Memory’ and ‘Tutorial’ were originally published before Plath’s death. Appendix 2: Vacanas

Hughes’s source was Speaking of Siva, edited by A. R. Ramanujan, an anthology of Dravidian poems by three different poets (one a woman) that are addressed to Siva under the names of ‘lord of the meeting rivers’, ‘lord white as jasmine’ and ‘lord of the caves’. Hughes began writing poems that he called ‘little prayers’ addressed to ‘lady of the hills’ when he feared he had throat cancer (Ted Hughes: the Unaccommodated Universe, p138). One of them is reprinted in Keith Sagar, ed., The Achievement of Ted Hughes, pp309–10.

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals

History Insights The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

Literature Insights (by author) Chatwin: In Patagonia Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell: Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hopkins: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Literature Insights (general) English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Business Ethics Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Heidegger Informal Logic and Critical Thinking Islamic Philosophy Marxism Meta-Ethics Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Sport Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wittgenstein

General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Commissioned Titles Include Aesthetics Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Heaney: Selected Poems Hughes: Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Poems Mental Causation Toni Morrison: Beloved Plato Plato’s Republic Renaissance Philosophy