{"id":231,"date":"2019-05-07T08:26:29","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T08:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp04.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=231"},"modified":"2019-05-08T04:39:54","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T04:39:54","slug":"ted-hughes","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp04\/chapter\/ted-hughes\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Hughes"},"content":{"raw":"
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1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Life & Influences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Childhood and early influences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Edward James Hughes, known as Ted Hughes, was born on the 17th of August 1930 in the little town of Mytholmroyd, in West Riding region of Yorkshire in England. Hughes\u2019s father William Hughes, a carpenter and later a shopkeeper, had served in the First World War.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hughes\u2019s poetry is full of images of the bleak moors and skies of Yorkshire, and its wind, rain, and shiny hills are images of a pitiless natural world. Besides these, the World War was vivid in Hughes\u2019s imagination as his father, who fought in the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915 who was one of the seventeen survivors in the battalion which participated in that campaign would narrate to his family, the stories of the fighting in the war which left him seriously wounded. Ted Hughes has prayed homage to his father\u2019s suffering in one of his poems entitled Out<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n

Education<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

When Hughes was seven years old, his family shifted to Mexborough, a coal mining town in South Yorkshire. He had his early education in\u00a0 Mexborough Grammar School, spent two years in the National Service Scheme as a wireless mechanic in the Royal Air force and then entered Pembroke\u00a0College, Cambridge on a scholarship. There he took up English literature as his chief subject of study, but two years later switched over to archaeology and anthropology. After graduating in 1954, he worked at various job in Cambridge and London. In 1956, he met Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fullbright scholarship, and within four months the two poets were married.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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1.3. Early Poetic Influences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Among the modern poets, Hughes had previously read Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence and Auden. He considered Dylan Thomas\u2019s Deaths and End Entrances <\/em>(1946) a holy book when it was first published. However the poetic influences most evident in his early works were Yeats, Hopkins, and Thomas, Ransom and the other Americans \u2013 Shapin, Lowell, Merwin, Wilbur \u2013 made it possible to continue his poetic creation.Hughes was also inspired by William Blake and Robert Graves\u2019s The White Goddess<\/em>. By 1956, Hughes was composing poems with a vivid sense of purpose and Plath entered a collection of her lyrics in a contest, the prize of which was publication by Harper. The judges Auden, Spender, and Marianne Moore selected Hughes\u2019s manuscript. The Hawk in the Rain <\/em>thus came to be published in London and New York in 1957 and received much critical acclaim.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The couple shifted their residence from the U.S to England when Plath was expecting their first child in 1950. Following the birth of a second child, marital discord arose and they were living apart when Plath committed suicide in 1963. Lupercal <\/em>published earlier in 1960 fulfilled the promise initiated by the earlier first volume but three years following the suicide of Plath, Hughes ceased\u00a0writing poems and devoted himself to creating children\u2019s literature, radio plays etc. But a trip to Ireland in 1966 revived his creative energy and he published <\/span>Wodow <\/em>in 1967. Meanwhile a meeting in 1957 with the American artist Leonard Baskin led to a fruitful collaboration whereby they produced books of poems and paintings illustrating each other. These included <\/span>Cave Birds<\/em>(1975, revised 1978) and <\/span>Moon-Whales <\/em>(1976). Baskin\u2019s wish for poems to go with his drawings of crows prompted Hughes to start writing the <\/span>Crow <\/em>sequence in 1966. In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, the daughter of a Devon farmer, whom he celebrated in his volume entitled \u201cMoortown.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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1.4 Later Interests<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

In the year 1970, Hughes joined several other writers to form \u201cthe Avron Foundation\u201d to promote and sponsor budding poets, novelists and playwrights. In the summer of 1971, he went to Iran with Peter Brook\u2019s international company to write a play for an Iranian theatrical organization. He published eight major collections in just over two decades apart form writing poetry and prose for children, plays for radio and stage short stories, and some very fine critical essays. A wide variety of forms and intentions mark the full range of Hughes works. This is a fact often overlooked by readers who often, attach the label of \u2018animal poet\u2019 or \u2018nature poet\u2019 to Hughes, according to P.R.King. Acknowledged as the most outstanding English poet of the age, he was appointed the poet Laureate England following Sir John Betjemen\u2019s death in 1989.<\/p>\r\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Major Themes in Hughes\u2019s Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nViolence<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Violence depicted in Hughes\u2019s poems includes not only of savage animals but also in human nature David Perkins in A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After <\/em>has pointed out that Hughes\u2019s poems \u201ctake their initiative from a concrete subject \u2013 an image, character or action \u2013 which is developed until the poem stands complete. Usually his poem tells a story or have narrative elements\u201d (454) Hughes has associated the word \u201cviolence\u201d with what he himself has termed as vehement activity or with what he also calls energy.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In an interview to a magazine editor Ted Hughes once remarked that any form of vehement activity invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the universe. Once the contact has been made, it becomes difficult to control. By refusing the energy, one lives a kind of death but if the energy is accepted it destroys the individual. Hence the only alternative is to accept the energy and find methods of turning it to good, of keeping, it under central through the old method of rituals and the machinery of religion. Poems like The Jaguar,\u00a0 Esther\u2019s Tomcat, View of a Pig, The Bull Moses, An Otter, Thrushes, Pike and Second glance at a Jaguar <\/em>depict animal violence. Others like Bayonet charge, Six Young Men <\/em>and The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar <\/em>present human violence.<\/p>\r\n

The Animal World<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hughes has been celebrated as the poet of the animal world. His animal poems are marked by his fierce concentration. Hughes himself has argued in Poetry in the Making <\/em>that the secret of writing poetry successfully is \u201cto imagine what you are writing about see it and live it\u2026 Just look at it, touch it, smell it,\u00a0listen to it, turn yourself into it\u2019 (quoted in Chris Woodward (Ed) <\/span>Ninetieth and Twentieth Century Verse <\/em>p.156).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Hughes puts this into practice in poems like The Thought-Fox <\/em>where the reader can smell the \u201csharp hot slink of fox\u201d and in Pike feel the \u201chooked clamp and fangs\u201d of the fishes\u2019 jaws. Hughes has written of the Thought fox <\/em>that \u2018every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them\u201d. (Poetry in the Making- pp. 20).\u00a0 Woodward remarks\u00a0 that few poets have evoked creatures with such sensuous immediacy Hughes is deeply attracted by the struggle for survival which is evident in the animal world Hughes describes creatures who are often predators and the deaths depicted by him are violent. \u201cThose who survived do so by virtue of their single mindedness\u2026 What some readers find most unsettling is the extent to which Hughes appears at times to glorify the strength and determination of the survivor to the point where he fails to sympathize with the plight of the defeated\u201d (Woodhead 157).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

A marked difference between Hughes\u2019s earlier and the later poems lies in the fact that the later poems, even while presenting an utterly unsentimental view of life, tries to explore the experience of the weak and dying with understanding and compassion. Hence as remarked by Chris Woodhead, the \u201cpiercing persistence\u201d of the child\u2019s repeated question focuses attention on the poignancy of the lamb\u2019s still-born death in Ravens <\/em>while in The Stag, <\/em>Hughes writes very much from the point of view of the hunted animal.<\/p>\r\n

Primitivism and mythology<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Hughes\u2019s frequent use of animals as the subject of his poetry springs from the fact that \u201che sees in them the most clear manifestation of a life-force that is distinctly non human, or rather, is non-rational in its source of power\u2026 since then he has moved on to express a sense of sterility and nihilism in modern man\u2019s response to life, a response which he connects with the dominance of man\u2019s rational, objective intellect at the expense of the life of the emotions and imagination\u201d (King 110).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Anthology Crow <\/em>(1980) gives the reader a protagonist \u2013 the crow \u2013 who is a curious and intriguing blend of ancient myths and legends, apart from the significance endowed upon the bird by Hughes himself. The concept of Crow-Man, was borrowed by Hughes from Leonard Baskins\u2019 drawings and he himself attributed features from Eskimo, Red Indian and Celtic folklore to the creature before launching him into the human world. P.R. King has termed\u00a0 Crow as Hughes\u2019s own creation myth, a kind of black genesis\u2026 a story in the stark and simple style of traditional \u201ccreation myths (for instance, the Eskimo legend of the black races and the White Snow). It was to express the idea that even a life of great pain and suffering could still contain an irreducible force for survival\u2026 Crow is the spirit of endurance, the basic grit for survival at the bottom of even the worst of experiences\u201d (135).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In form, the Crow poems may have been influenced by the Yugoslav poet, Vasko Popa whose vision \u201cof the struggle of animal cells and of the torment of the spirit in a world reduced to this\u201d attracted Hughes, which he states in his introduction to Popa\u2019s collected poems in 1978 (Perkins 455). Hughes\u00a0also praises Popa\u2019s shift here from \u201cliterary surrealism the far older and deeper thing, the surrealism of the folklore\u201d that functions as \u201ca little fable or visionary anecdote\u201d (Perkins 455)<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Crow and the Trickster Mythology<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Several critics have related crow poems to the Trickster myths of the North American Indians which present a wandering hero, always hungry and not guided by normal conceptions of good and evil, who is often playing tricks on people or having them played on him. The trickster is often a raven and in both the myths of the Indians and those of Hughes, the events take place at the beginning or end of the cosmos, with no specific place or time. Similar to the myths of the Trickster and many other primitive myths, several of the crow poems explain how a feature of existence originated.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

\u201cA Childish Prank\u201d is one such poem where the Crow intervenes in Gods problem of how to bring life to Adam and Eve. The problem in so great that\u00a0 God sleeps on it, and while he sleeps the Crow, laughing, bites the worm in half and stuffs half into Adam and half into Eve. Ever afterwards, the two are continually trying to come together for the two halves of the worm to join up<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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He shifted into man the tail half<\/p>\r\n

With the wounded end hanging out.<\/p>\r\n

He stuffed the head half head first into woman<\/p>\r\n

And it crept in deeper and up.<\/p>\r\n

To peer out through her eyes<\/p>\r\n

Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Because O it was painful.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\u201cIt is a Sardonic View of Sex. This is one of the most successful of the individual poems. It creates speedily and simply\u00a0 with force and black humour an alternative to the traditional biblical creation story\u201d (King 139).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

It has been widely held that Hughes\u2019s Crow is an antagonist Bible, a myth that parallels and denies the Biblical one. These poems are a Satire on the prevailing religious beliefs of the people, especially on the Biblical doctrines regarding the Creation of man, and man\u2019s fall from grace. Taken as a whole, they are a satire on Christianity and the Christian beliefs, anti-Biblical and anti- traditional and show Hughes\u2019s skill in employing irony and Sarcasm. Both highly entertaining and profoundly startling in structure, these poems are highly shocking and debunk all traditional beliefs of religion.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Wodwo and other bird myths<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Wodwo <\/em>(1967) exhibits Hughes\u2019s increased preoccupation with\u00a0 describing the divided nature of man and his relationship to the non-human powers of the universe. The title poem of the volume is a dramatic monologue expressing the thoughts of a creature, half-man, half-beast. Wodwo is\u00a0 Wuduwasa <\/em>in Old English, the early Briton who hide in the woods to escape the Romans in the medieval romance, in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight<\/em>, \u2018Wodwo\u2019 is a wild man of the woods. This creature is on the verse of self- consciousness and seeks knowledge of his identity. Written without punctuation except for interrogatives, the words and ideas run together in a stream of\u00a0consciousness that suggests the half-rational, confused state of mind of this proto-human creature.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The poem opens with the apocalyptic question \u201cWho am I?\u201d and records the search for an explanation of self, an attempt to discover a pattern of meaning in the universe. Thrust into the universe without a god to guide him,<\/p>\r\n \r\n

\u201cI\u2019ve no threads fastening me to anything I can go anywhere I seem to have been given the freedom Of this place what am I then?\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Wodwo is modern man desperate in his desire to know himself. Michael Schmidt remarks \u201cD.H. Lawrence subjects us to violence and pain, \u201copens\u201d us, in order to be filled and fulfilled. Hughes at times seems to want to open us to\u00a0 be hurt. In Wodwo <\/em>literal creatures give way to imaginary ones, nightmare is all about us\u201d (191).Hughes is articulating \u201cmodern man\u2019s experience of living in a universe that surrounds him with chaos and which seems to offer no obvious purpose\u201d (King 133).<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0Hughes\u2019s interest in Shamanism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Since Hughes\u2019s major poems are preoccupied with the relationship between the human mind and the forces which govern man\u2019s material existence, Hughes shows a deep interest in Shamanism. Anthropologists have used the\u00a0 term \u201cShaman\u201d to denote a sorcerer or a with-doctor. He was valued in the older ages for possessing knowledge and direct experience, of \u201cother\u201d worlds which the ordinary man is familiar with only through rituals and myths. Such abilities enabled the Shaman with the ability to cure the sick. The Shaman\u2019s rituals\u00a0involved singing, dancing and recitation, using a special kind of poetic vocabulary. The modern scientific age affords no scope for faith in Shamanistic rituals yet Hughes\u2019s constant preoccupation with subjects like the unconscious mind, death, the ancient myths and the animal world show his affinity with Shamanism. Many of his poems have been cited by critics as unembarrassed Shamanic flights of fancy onto the spirit world, excursions to the \u201cother side\u201d, where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject, be it animals, vegetable or mineral, be it Jaguar, snowdrop or rocky crag.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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What Hughes shares with a Shaman of the old times is a concern for mental or psychic equilibrium. It is also interesting to note that though Hughes had taken up English literature as his subject of study, he later on changed over to archaeology and anthropology. His poem, \u2018Witches\u2019 show his interest in Shaminsm.<\/p>\r\n

War Poems<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hughes had first-hand experience of war as his own father had fought in the World War I and barely survived and Hughes\u2019s poem entitled \u2018Out\u2019, is a meditation on his father\u2019s experiences in the war, one of the few autobiographical poems written by the poet. Bill Hughes, Ted Hughes\u2019s father was one of the seventeen survivors in his regiment and was saved on a memorable occasion when a piece of shrapnel, which should have struck his heart, was deflected by a pay-book in his breast-pocket. Ted Hughes who was only four years old had ever since been gripped by war in his imagination The Hawk in the Rain <\/em>anticipates six poems on war while Wodwo <\/em>includes\u00a0Scapegoats and Rabies<\/em>, <\/span>Bowled Over <\/em>(which relates a soldiers desertion in the face of bullet) and <\/span>Out<\/em>. The poem <\/span>Out <\/em>depicts the four year old Hughes\u2019s absorption of the war at his father\u2019s feet and how it destroyed the Eden of his childhood. The second section of the poem anticipates the birth of a dead man which is the image of a generation of children born for a precise function- to die, and for whom innocence is impossible due to a consciousness of death. The last section of the poem entitled Remembrance Day makes use of the symbol \u2013 the flower poppy which serves as a remembrance in honour of the dead soldiers who had laid down their lives in the service of the country.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Hughes does not glorify war or idealize the soldiers taking part in the war. He does not think of war in terms of patriotism or heroism or even victory. War is something abhorrent and horrifying to the poet.<\/p>\r\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Later Works<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

His later works include Season Songs <\/em>(1976), a series of lyrics on the turning seasons, originally written for children, followed by Gaudete <\/em>(1977), Cave Birds <\/em>(1978) and Remains of Emlet <\/em>(1979). Moortown <\/em>(1979) and River <\/em>(1983) followed. Ted Hughes\u2019s Birthday Letters <\/em>published in 1998, published a few months before the death of Hughes, is a collection of eighty eight poems which seeks to explore the suicide of his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath in 1963 and their much discussed, politicized and controversial marriage. It is an attempt to address \u201ca loss without self-pity and with as much precision as his memory would allow, answering with unusual quietness and with his eyes averted from those decades of savage and malicious critics and gossips. He is trying to\u00a0resolve a relationship which was his and hers but has become legendary\u201d (Schmidt 191). This collection published more than thirty years after the Sylvia Plath\u2019s suicide is a poignant recollection of the ill-fated relationship. It was several awards including T.S.Eliot prize and Whitbread Book of the Year prize apart from topping the bestseller list for a long time.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Analysis of the poem \u2018Hawk Roosting\u2019<\/p>\r\n

I sit on the top of the wood, my eyes closed.<\/p>\r\n

Inaction, no falsifying dream<\/p>\r\n

Between my hooked head and hooked feet;<\/p>\r\n

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.<\/p>\r\n

The convenience of the high trees!<\/p>\r\n

The air\u2019s buoyancy and the sun\u2019s ray<\/p>\r\n

Are of advantage to me;<\/p>\r\n

And the earth\u2019s face upward for my inspection.<\/p>\r\n

My feet are locked upon the rough bark<\/p>\r\n

It took the whole of creation<\/p>\r\n

To produce my foot, my each feather<\/p>\r\n

Now I hold creation in my foot<\/p>\r\n

Or fly up and revolve it all slowly \u2013<\/p>\r\n

I kill where I please because it is all mine.<\/p>\r\n

There is no sophistry in my body;<\/p>\r\n

My manners are tearing off heads \u2013<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The allotment of death.<\/p>\r\n

For the one path of my flight is direct<\/p>\r\n

Through the bones of the living.<\/p>\r\n

No arguments assert my right:<\/p>\r\n

The sun is behind me.<\/p>\r\n

Nothing has changed since I began.<\/p>\r\n

My eye has permitted no change.<\/p>\r\n

I am going to keep things like this.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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This poem, from Lupercal <\/em>(1960), is a companion piece to the earlier The Hawk in the Rain <\/em>published in the 1957 anthology of the same title. Here the bird is not described from the outside as in the earlier piece. The readers are straight away plunged into the hawk\u2019s head and its state of mind is imagined and recreated according to P.R. King.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Apart from being a vivid study of the bird, it is a commentary on power mania and the poet masterfully faces the two themes together. Thus\u00a0 the supposed ruminations of the hawk merge with the thought process of some Fascist dictator like Hitler who is ruthless, arrogant egocentric and megalomaniac. Hence like \u2018The Thought-Fox\u2019 this poem too is concerned with its symbolic theme rather than its intended one.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The forceful, arrogant and confident theme of the poem not only emphasizes the strength and power of the bird but also insists on the isolation of the bird and on its brutish strength which leave no room for feelings of compassion.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The hawk prides himself as the apotheosis of power, boasting that it took the whole of creation to produce its foot and each feather. But now he prides that he holds creation in his foot.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Unlike man, the hawk is not assailed by doubts or delicate and weakening scruples which hinder him from accomplishing his will. He boasts that his manners are \u201ctearing off heads \/ the allotment of death\u201d. The hawk\u2019s monologue, described by David Perkins as \u201cmurderous instinct and manic egoism\u201d, evokes a menace arising from the hawk\u2019s assumption of Godlike powers and his utterly amoral, inhuman attitude. Hughes himself has stated that what he \u201chad in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking\u201d (Interview with Hughes in London Magazine<\/em>, January 1971 \u2018Ted Hughes and Crow<\/em>) It is a nature that has nothing to do with morality, compassion or justice. Thus the poem becomes a simple description of the amoral nature and the awful power of non-human life, as contrasted with the limitations of the power of human nature. The hawk is presented as a being vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what she is and seeks to tame it by giving it philosophical names. The hawk, on the other hand, is not tortured by man\u2019s devitalizing intellectuality or his slavish obedience to rules. Hence the hawk proudly asserts \u201cThere is no sophistry in my body \/ my manners are tearing off heads.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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