Owen Johnson TED HUGHES
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Owen Johnson TED HUGHES: SPEAKING FOR THE EARTH Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1991. This thesis explores the attempt in Ted Hughes' poems to reconcile 'fallen' human consciousness and unreflecting, instinctive involvement in the Earth: consciousness must learn to understand, and to speak for, the Earth it is alienated from. Part One suggests the relevance of the thinking in Hughes' poetry and prose to contemporary ecological theories; it also tries to answer liberal, Marxist, feminist and other critiques of Hughes' work and to justify his ideas on free will, reason, violence, schizophrenia, ritual, shamanism and other subjects. The thesis, secondly, argues for poems' aesthetic importance: Part Two explores a large number of individual poems, offering paraphrases for their more philosophically complex arguments and showing how themes such as the flux of existence (symbolized by wheels and rivers) run through Hughes' oeuvre. Wodwo, Crow, Cave Birds, the Gaudete epilogue, Moortown and River are considered as unified wholes, whose end, of speaking for the Earth, is occasionally and briefly attained. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 18 AUG 1992 CONTENTS Page Introduction: Literary Criticism and Hughes' Poetry 1 PART ONE Chapter 1: The Earth la: Hughes and Human Ecology 10 lb: Poetry and Ecology 22 2a: David Holbrook on Hughes 26 2b: Hughes' 'Natural Scientism' 27 2c: Contradictory Influences of Blake and Graves 32 2d: Zen, Memory, Subjectivity 35 3a: Graham Bradshaw on Hughes 38 3b: Reason 39 3c: Myth and Ritual 41 3d: Shamanism 44 4a: Dennis Walder on Hughes 46 4b: Hughes and Feminism 48 5a: Martin Dodsworth on Hughes. The Individual and the Community; England 52 5b: Hughes and History 56 5c: People in the Poems 56 6a: Eric Homberger on Hughes 57 6b: Fascism 58 6c: Violence and Tenderness 61 7: Al Alvarez on Hughes 64 8: Provinciality 65 Chapter 2: Speaking la: Poetry and Nature 67 lb: Words and Reality 70 lc: Hierarchy, Relatedness, Structure 74 2a: Stylistic Ideals 79 2b: Simplicity 80 2c: Roughness and Smoothness 82 2d: Rhetoric 84 2e: Poetry and Music 85 2f: Prosody 87 3: Humour in the Poetry 89 4a: Influences, Sources and Analogues 90 4b: Janos Pilinszky: Guilt and Free Will 95 5a: Mono No Award Wo Shiru 99 5b: Panta Rhei; The Wheel and the River 100 Chapter 3: For 1: Dualism and Consciousness 103 2a: The Myth of Hughes' Poetry 108 2b: Poetry and Silence 112 PART TWO Chapter 1: Some Early Poems 1: The Hawk in the Rain 115 2: Lupercal 122 Chapter 2: Wodwo 130 Chapter 3: Crow 151 Chapter 4: Cave Birds 175 Chapter 5: Gaudete 189 Chapter 6: Moortown 221 Chapter 7: Some Writing for Children 246 Chapter 8: Remains of Elmet, River, Flowers and Ilaaaig 1: Remains of Elmet 257 2: River 261 3: Flowers and Insects ' 275 Chapter 9: Wolfwatching 279 Bibliography 287 NOTE If a reference (in brackets) takes the form of 1 Sagar 1978' (date second), see bibliography, section 4 (general works). If a reference takes the form of '1981 "A Reply"' (date first), see bibliography, section 3 (miscellaneous writings by Hughes). If the writing in question is reprinted in 'Appendix 1 1 of Ekbert Faas' Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated 'Universe (pp. 163 - 194), reference is also made to this, as the most readily available source. Faas' 'Appendix 2/ is the only source I give for quotations from Hughes' two interviews with Faas, of 1970 (not published until 1971), and 1977. Section 2 of my bibliography provides sources for the uncollected poems by Hughes referred to in this thesis. Section 1 of the bibliography gives the editions of Hughes' major works used in the thesis: numerous textual variations occur among editions. -1- INTRODUCTION: LITERARY CRITICISM AND HUGHES' POETRY One aim of this thesis is to consider the coherence and responsibility of Ted Hughes' thinking on society, and on poetic technique. His advocates as well as detractors seem to have underestimated his position as an innovative orsignificant thinker: he 'is, of course, no philosopher' (Sagar 1978 p. 65), being 'more successful as an informed observer than as a weighty thinker' (Bold 1976 p. 68), 'a mime' 'not... an arguer' (Derwent May in Dodsworth 1970 p. 162), 'the least academic of poets' (Raine 1979). When he calls Vasko Popa 'the sophisticated philosopher' (1967 Topa': Faas 1980 p. 184), Hughes' interpretation of philosophy seems of something more private and intuitive than our culture's, but the poet who had Plath reading 'books on folklore, fiddler crabs and meteorites' (in Faas 1980 p. 41) remains deeply learned, intellectually rigorous in his poetry and sane in his ecological spokesmanship. The ordering device of the first chapter is to represent and answer critics' and poets' misinterpretations of Hughes' ideas. Although one's response to so uncompromisingly romantic a writer will, to a certain extent, remain temperamentally determined, a lot of the hostility and impatience concerning Hughes' work is still born of nothing more than misunderstanding: twelve years on, Cave Birds and Moortown surely remain among the least read books of their stature. Part Two of the thesis attempts to analyze Hughes' important poems, cataloguing the kind of mannerisms and complexities Part One definesrand, on occasion, simply providing glosses. Such analyses (where criticism aspires to the absolute objectivity of the sciences) will in one way certainly insult • the poems, imposing a single solution upon them and trampling over linguistic subtleties. But I think the sheer bewilderment with which Cave Birds or the Gaudete lyrics are still met can justify the reductions: Hughes' poetry seems large enough to accommodate and respond to this kind of criticism, as well as any number of other kinds. Keith Sagar l s suggestion that our 'standard -2- critical equipment' expects 'kinds of rational, paraphrasable meaning the poems don't in fact offer' (Sagar 1990) appears curiously askew. Most critics seem puzzled by Hughes' poetry because, I shall be arguing, it is far more 'rational' - better to say 'thought-ful t - than most contemporary verse. Though scholarly criticism, of whatever kind, seems a betrayal of Hughes' commitments to imagination and to everything beyond literature, it is one, perhaps, in the nature of the Fall, as Hughes understands it; of writing poetry itself. I end Part One of the thesis by suggesting how the gap, in Hughes' poems, between manner and message, words and reality, dualistic consciousness and imaginative wholeness, is never perfectly bridged. If his poems depend on the intellectuality they speak against, if they seem as much schematic as visionary, his own critical remarks at least come to recognize the scholar's problem of conscience. An early poem, 'Tutorial', expresses plain contempt for 'the onslaught of the academics' (Booth 1985 p. 152) - 'plucking the heads and legs off words'. (After two years of Cambridge English, Hughes dreamed a fox-headed spirit planted a blood-stained paw on his latest essay and said, 'You're killing us' - Sagar 1978 P. 8.) Hughes asked Faas not to print parts of their January 1971 interview presumably 'to avoid sending his critics', as Eliot sent his, 'off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail' (Faas 1971 p. 5), feeling it 'better if the [Crow] poem operates without.., scholarly-pedantic baggage' (in Gifford and Roberts 1981 p. 260). Adapting Seneca's Oedipus, he o itted nearly all mythological allusions. (Hirschberg's 'computer print-out of every conceivable [mytholo- gical] reference' (Garfitt 1981 p. 850) see s surprisingly seliom to help understanding of the poe s: this is one annotation I prviicieorliti where it still seems unavoidable.) Yet Hughes not only feels unable to claim Qz2x LIE °per te 'without... baggage' but admits he 'should perhaps have taken more trouble to bridge -3- the culture gap that seems to render... Crow nearly inaccessible to some readers' (1981 'A Reply' p. 4) - which seems to delegate the business to academics. An enthusiastic critic himself - a whole book on Shakespeare, The Silence of Cordelia, is forthcoming - Hughes' verse inevitably stands largely within a tradition developing in symbiosis with academic criticism. 'I imagine every writer has' 'a jury of critics sitting over what [they] write', he tells Faas (1980 p. 202) - Yeats being his judge. 'The fact that I know that my main audience will be an academic audience, in a roundabout way and against my will, influences the kind of thing I write. I tend to build in satisfactions for that audience' (ibid. p. 55). What 'against my will' furls over seems the apparently unavoidable gap between p erfect, unself- conscious self-expression, and fallen consciousness. If Hughes' conscious techniques ask critical comment, so does his most 'unconscious', 'inspired' poetry: Hughes, consciously retrospective, offers his own (see, for instance, Gifford and Roberts 1981 pp. 256 - 260, and 1981 'A Reply' pp. 5 - 6) with a tentativeness disclaiming authorial pri- ority. 'It's easy enough [for him] to give interpretations [of Crow poems] ... but whether they'd be the real explanations [he does not] know' (Faas 1980 p. 207). Here he still posits a 'real' (objective) explanation; but misreadings can singlehandedly illuminate it: 'in one main sense, ['Truth Kills Everybodyl] is about just the sort of misreading it seems to provoke - the cuttlefish ink-clouds, behind which the real nature of the thing escapes, are Rorschach blots, of a kind' (1981 'A Reply' p. 6). Often, however, 'as far as inter- pretation goes[, he leaves] all options open' (Foos 1980 p. 214). (When in 1990 Sagar attempted a patchwork synthesis of Hughes' 'interpretations' of Crow, Hughes vetoed the paper, calling it 'embarrassing' (Sagar 1990) and feeling,presumably,that, if understood as his conclusive statement about the book, it would stultify personal, critical readings.) Deconstruction is -4- .