Ted Hughes. New Selected Poems. http// the life we share with other creatures the realm of the

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1 Running Head http// 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

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 Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Reading Options * Please adjust the magnification to 82% and progress by using the page forward / back buttons (to enlarge text further, select full screen: CTRL+L). * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked Bookmarks at the left of the screen. * To search, click the search symbol and select show all results. * Hyperlinks, if any, are enabled for PC users only. * For the convenience of Mac users, any internal hyperlinks are also bookmarked, along with chapters and appendices. * To return from visiting an internal hyperlink or appendix please use the green previous view button to return to your starting point. Licence and permissions This book is licensed for a particular computer or computers. The file itself may be copied, but the copy will not open until the new user obtains a licence from the Humanities-Ebooks website in the usual manner. The original purchaser may license the same work for a second computer by applying to support@humanities-ebooks.co.uk with proof of purchase. Permissions: it is permissible to print one copy of this book (which must be done as one operation) but not to copy and paste text. ISBN

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

4 Contents A Note on the Author Part 1: The context of New Selected Poems 1.1 General Introduction 1.2 Hughes s early life 1.3 Early writing 1.4 Cambridge and the Burnt Fox 1.5 Sylvia Plath 1.6 Crow and more tragedy 1.7 Persecution 1.8 The Poet Laureate Part 2: Artistic strategies and influences 2.1 Dialect 2.2 Shakespeare, Romantics and Moderns 2.3 The White Goddess 2.4 The influence of Sylvia Plath 2.5 Shamanism 2.6 East European Poetry 2.7 Trickster Mythology 2.8 Confessional poetry Part 3: Reading New Selected Poems 3.1 The Hawk in the Rain 3.2 Lupercal 3.3 Wodwo 3.4 Crow

5 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 Works by Ted Hughes 5.2 Web Sites 5.3 Criticism and Biography 5.4 Other Works Part 6: Appendices Appendix 1: Wodwo Appendix 2: Vacanas

6 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.

7 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. 1 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

8 Ted Hughes 8 four selections of his work, beginning with a joint Selected Poems with Thom Gunn in 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 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 Thought- Fox 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.

9 Ted Hughes 9 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. 3 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 2 Ted Hughes, The Rock, The Listener, 70, pp , 19 September Quoted in Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, Armidale New South Wales, University of New England Press, 1994, p. 176