The Ted Hughes Society Journal Volume VII Issue 1 Special Issue Ted Hughes and Place Guest Editor James Underwood 1 The Ted Hughes Society Journal Editor Dr Mark Wormald Pembroke College Cambridge Reviews Editor Prof. Terry Gifford Bath Spa University Editorial Board Prof. Terry Gifford Bath Spa University Dr Yvonne Reddick University of Preston Prof. Neil Roberts University of Sheffield Dr James Robinson Durham University Dr Carrie Smith Cardiff University Published by the Ted Hughes Society. All matters pertaining to the Ted Hughes Society Journal should be sent to: [email protected] You can contact the Ted Hughes Society via email at: [email protected] Questions about joining the Society should be sent to: [email protected] thetedhughessociety.org This Journal is copyright of the Ted Hughes Society but copyright of the articles is the property of their authors. 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Commercial copying is prohibited without written consent. 2 Contents Editorial ......................................................................................................................4 List of abbreviations of works by Ted Hughes ......................................................... 6 What Did Ted Hughes Learn from Anthropology? ................................................... 7 Robert Layton Ted Hughes and the Post-Nuclear Landscape ........................................................ 27 Felicity Powell Mapping Elmet: The Duality of Hughes’s Calder Valley ........................................ 38 Ruth Crossley From Remains to Elmet: A Lexical Study of Hughes’s West Yorkshire Texts ....... 49 Kyra Piperides The Lyre of Orpheus: Ted Hughes and Nick Cave ................................................. 66 Peter Fydler ‘A Buried Land and a Blazing Source’: Ted Hughes and William Golding ............. 77 Nicola Presley Two Contemporary Poets and the Ted Hughes Bestiary ....................................... 89 Daniel Weston Reviews ................................................................................................................... 102 Contributors ........................................................................................................... 109 3 Editorial For those of us born in the Mytholmroyds and Mexboroughs of this world, Ted Hughes is one of those writers we appreciate deeply for their ability to summon poetry from the most unlikely or unpromising of places; and who, in doing so, show us that there was never anything unlikely or unpromising about them. Huddersfield, where the Ted Hughes Network was established at the University in 2016, sits somewhere between Hughes’s Mytholmroyd and Mexborough. Though at the edge of Hughes’s Elmet, there are those who claim that this Pennine town is actually at the centre of the poetry universe; whatever the truth of this mysterious claim, it was Hughes’s relation to place which seemed the obvious focus for the Network’s inaugural conference, which was held at the University in June 2017. Hughes’s vision, of course, stretched far beyond his native Yorkshire, taking in Cambridge, London, Devon, Ireland, America’s eastern seaboard, wild Alaska, and the ruins of Persepolis, to name just some of the locations of his life and work. In devising the conference, however, we also wanted to explore this writer’s ‘place’ in literary, cultural, and social histories: his relation to the poetic tradition, for example, and to his contemporaries, or to the post-war world. The result of this deliberately baggy theme was a rich two days of discussion and exchange, with twenty-five fascinating papers presented by scholars who themselves approached the topic from a wide range of places, geographical and intellectual. Some of the fruits of that conference were published in the most recent number of the Journal, and it gives me great pleasure, as guest editor of the present one, to introduce seven more in this Special Issue on Ted Hughes and Place. The essays published here reflect the breadth of proceedings during those two days last summer. Robert Layton, an eminent anthropologist, opens this Special Issue by asking what Hughes learned from his discipline. Although Hughes’s experience of the Cambridge Anthropology degree may not have given him everything he wanted, Layton shows how Hughes’s studies would pay off in his poetry and prose, not least in the form of his masterpiece Crow, a work which also looms large in Felicity Powell’s exploration of the poet’s post-nuclear landscapes. Her essay argues that Hughes’s life was ‘shaped by the atomic events of the twentieth century’, and his writing ‘charged by nuclear activity’. As in Layton’s essay, the figure of the trickster emerges as a way for Hughes to heal rifts, in this case those opened up by Cold War culture. 4 The essays by Ruth Crossley and Kyra Piperides also speak to one another in intriguing ways. Though both explore Hughes’s Elmet, each one takes a very different approach. Crossley’s literary-geographical project is rooted in a charming and totally unique archive created by her late father. Her multifaceted mapping of Elmet reveals an intensely personal kingdom with two capitals, Mytholmroyd and Heptonstall. Duality and difference also feature strongly in Piperides’s lexical study, which tracks linguistic changes between Remains of Elmet and Elmet in order to interpret the evolution of these texts. Where the 1979 book focuses largely on the area’s ‘histories and geographies’, Elmet opens up those ‘personal histories’ which Crossley’s research is also uncovering and amplifying. The final trio of essays demonstrate Hughes’s far-reaching and diverse impact on his contemporaries and on contemporary culture. Perceptively and persuasively, Peter Fydler shows Hughes’s influence on Nick Cave, in a paper which also glances at Captain Beefheart, Graham Coxon, and The Human League. With some remarkable intertextualities to be found in both Cave’s lyrics and novels, Fydler’s essay adds a new strand to the story of Hughes’s influence. Nicola Presley looks at a more conservative figure in her exploration of the literary relationship between the poet and William Golding, whose novels clearly appealed to Hughes’s anthropological imagination. Hughes’s verse, in turn, seemingly appealed to Golding, whose bemused attitude to contemporary poetry may have prevented his own entry into that arena, but did not prevent his appreciation of a fellow grammar school boy he once called ‘the greatest living English-language poet’. Daniel Weston brings the record up to date by discussing Hughes’s impact on two immensely accomplished contemporary poets, Alice Oswald and John Burnside. These writers do not simply inherit Hughes’s legacy, but, as Weston argues, help to re-shape it by attending to the ‘creatureliness’ of his animal poems, a phenomenon neglected in early critical assessments of his work. One of the gratifying aspects of guest-editing the Journal has been the opportunity to work with and present here a number of new voices in Hughes studies; I am grateful to Mark Wormald and to the Ted Hughes Society for the invitation to assemble this Special Issue. Attention now turns to the Society’s 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, Poetry in the Making, taking place this August at Gregynog Hall in Powys, with an impressive line-up organised by Carrie Smith. James Underwood University of Huddersfield 5 List of abbreviations of works by Ted Hughes C Crow (London: Faber & Faber, 1970) CP Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber & Faber, 2003) E Elmet (London: Faber & Faber, 1994) G Gaudete (London: Faber & Faber, 1977) LTH Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007) PM Poetry in the Making (London: Faber & Faber, 1989 [1967]) RE Remains of Elmet (London: Faber & Faber, 1979) W Wodwo (London: Faber & Faber, 1967) WP Winter Pollen (London: Faber & Faber, 1994) 6 What Did Ted Hughes Learn from Anthropology? Robert Layton During the second year of his undergraduate career in Cambridge, Ted Hughes found that study in the English Department was stifling his creativity, and he transferred to Anthropology. I never met Ted Hughes, although we had a friend in common, Sue Alliston. Sue and I were among the twelve or so Bachelor’s degree students studying Anthropology at University College London from 1963 to 1966. Yet it was only recently I learned that Hughes switched from English Literature to Archaeology and Anthropology in the autumn of 1953.1 The paper asks what Hughes may have hoped to gain from anthropology, what he is likely to have actually learned, and how anthropological knowledge informs his poetry and prose. The dramatic story of Hughes’s flight from English is related in his 1993 essay ‘The Burnt Fox’. Hughes read English for his first two years as an undergraduate (1951–3). Although he had expected a course in English would help him with his own writing, it had the opposite effect. Elaine Feinstein records that Hughes disliked F.R. Leavis’s practice of dissecting poetry, although Neil Roberts argues that Hughes exaggerated Leavis’s destructive effect.2 The problem came to a head as he struggled with one of the last essays he had to submit before his Part I exams. Going to bed with only the first sentence completed, Hughes dreamed the figure of a fox the size of a wolf entered his room. It spread