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Ted Hughes Author(S): DAVID PORTER Source: the American Poetry Review, Vol Ted Hughes Author(s): DAVID PORTER Source: The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (September/October 1975), pp. 13-18 Published by: American Poetry Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27775040 Accessed: 02-01-2016 07:18 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Poetry Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Poetry Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Departure At Dusk: The Airport Corridors, The Late Autumn Plane Goodbye friends inyour hiding places Ha! Already I can hear you walking away inmy memory wearing your coats of skins and looking to the sky. like the echos of a lost watch. Autumn to has disappeared the south and you The delicate trail fades and disappears are settled into hawthorn thickets growing smaller like a vapor path across the night sky. ? holding hands with your sexy girlfriendthe night. You migrate, you hibernate or you die how can I love you so much when you can't even Over the ridge, over your eyes caged in branches understand nature's simplest laws? enormous black flights of birds are coming in low the ? crossing stream just north of you No Don't you dare wave to me! Goodbye where ? the dead sheep fade into the soil you ridiculous fast-breathing padded bones fade away to bones and thick white coats I can no longer bear saying goodbye to. and sink into the layers of earth beneath them where the slow hearts of moles beat in controlled death down the long corridors of sleep. David Porter pho to by Ma In the of Ted like killer The poetry Hughes predatory, sharks. Hughes, is immediate: to keep all Yet no poet writing today is we are the death of a sea to he witnessing pulls everything pieces, the sensibilities intact. How, af more deeply endowed by the familiar but now has its increasingly written, "except killers, ter all, could the studied moder English literary inheritance than irrelevant aesthetic. Simulta alert and Thus shapely." poems nist styles ofEliot and Auden and Hughes. To say what others have we see in the must be the neously emerging instinctively about their followers perceive today the not yet ventured these days about work of this a new of English poet business, Hughes says, simultaneous meaning of Disney a new language, a new poet, and a idea of an enor the dif poetry involving managing practical World, tiger cages, and new poetry in deep reconcilement mous acceleration of ? of intake ficulties survival. This radical thalidomide except pretentiously with the consciousness of our age, folk ad means two basic myth, epic, cycle, comics, conception from a great distance and he involves us not only in his own vertising, TV, the other pop things: poems inhabit the same the of books? and in the microcosm of ? through spectacles poetry and world as assassinations and must a disposables aggressively "When he lay in doorway and England today, but also in reconciled to the consciousness of not allow themselves to be made watched the bullets lifting the English dialect and in the projec a culture. His ob trivial post-literate by comparison; poems cobbles out of the street beside ts of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas is is make the essential jective poetry that equipped thing happen, him,,, so Hughes has written of and Keith Douglas, of Emily for life. rescue us from inanition. they the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, of The old dominated This is their totemic value as the aesthetic, "he realized that most poetry is Yeats and Jung. In addition, he by the Americans Ezra Pound main regenerative acts of the not equipped for life in a world makes an aesthetics out of the and T. S. seems in this new human Eliot, psyche. where people actually do die.'' lives of beasts. to an light have been static, Hughes's mode is no sweet new In Ted Hughes's work, ac or elegant urn, simply diffuse and style, but rather wily, elemen cordingly, are early signs of a rose self-consciously erudite ("the tary, and attacking like an deep geological shift under way in I. The Present Age in the steel dust"; "medallions / animal. It is not the twitches and English language poetry. The The dominant fact of our age, to Theirs was a of forge Achaia"). rustles "confessional" poets slide is away from poetry that is according to Hughes, is that vulnerable its passive, aesthetic, out of university writing classes. predominantly isolated, in Western men have lost contact fragilitythe subject of much of Least of all is it like that of his dividual, inward-turning, and with the raw dream of their their Robert Lowell ex of poetry. generation writers in England, self-indulgently hallucinatory origins. They are partial men, in tends their in his whose someone has called assumptions poems toward works which, in Hughes's capable of mastering the brute balanced meditations. over of laboriously mournful mouthings pints words, are in tune with the rhyth beauty of their lives. Thus Hart Crane Forty years ago beer, soiled sheets, and garden ms of the people in a direct and Hughes conceives an exemplary in a distilled the presiding idea implements. Hughes's style is dynamic way, that is, toward counter-thrusting poetry which, on the gloss poem "Chaplin conglomerate, ravenous, drawing poetry that is folk-oriented, hawk-like, attains the powerfully the human in to esque": "Poetry,' everythingfrom Old English radically political. The resulting balanced exertion Hopkins called so feelings, the kitten,' is shamanism to pop. His imagined separation is Hughes's poetics mastery. Animals and other of the a over crowded out humdrum, poet is scavenger all the from the old familiar tonalities ex creatures are equipped by sinew mechanized scramble of today mishmash of the globed junkyard, plains why he is thought to have and instinct for such life. When that the man who would preserve hardly the archetypal figure barbarized the vocation of poet this happens in poetry it is a mat them and saw as must duck camouflage James Joyce the God of and to have forsaken his ter of language. Though in for dear life to them or him keep creation, indifferent, paring his humanistic obligations. Ian consistently attained, that is self from annihilation.'' fingernails. Hamilton, the English poet and Hughes 's considerable goal: a The new of Ted poetics Hughes The crucial objective in our critic, says stiffly that Hughes poetic language resourceful conceives as to poems hard and wasting culture, according simply ismistaken. enough to assert itself amid the September/October 1975 Page 13 This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions terror crushing banality and cal (I960), Wodwo (1967), Crow Hughes's condemnation of fashions. He calls his fellow poets our for which which are the terms of times. 11970), and Selected Poems 1957 civilized stupor brushed even to a more difficult role times are his His own language at 1967(19721 Sophocles, whose moral the East Europeans to seil achieves, as he says of equations and formal finish seem paradigms. "They refuse the of to to out ... in order to with Shakespeare's, aspect II. The East European to him not reveal but hide escape a of some some being invented in state crisis, Poets the bloody root of Oedipus' suf fragmentary sense, of self for a terribly urgent job. Poems fering. It is, he believes, by abstract badge When Hughes reads his poetry a from the cycle Crow (1970), for groping in those pits opened estrangement, into popular to in public he leans slightly, as if in example, range from lyric beneath the rhetoric that we membership safety." Every man, to a chronic Yorkshire wind or, or devotion to street curse, com grasp our basic fable and con whether he likes it not, says better, as if away from the sensed his as in the poem "A devise our salvation. Hughes, is a micro-model of pacted of a cliff. He once sequently Horrible Error": overhang But words from the old lexicon nation but it is the poet who must Religious face that described the rock no are no the streets where the When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel longer draw blood. They find loomed over his Yorkshire on. brown, match for Crow in Hughes's shooting is going "One atom this way: "Something it is From the hatched birthplace surrealization: imagines," he has said, "that its alibi twisted around it about the clouds and the in With self light, Words attacked him with the glottal only those poets whose make-up or some ? clination of the season, bomb somehow coincides with the vital Lifting a long neck of the overnight strengthening He wasn'? listening. of their times who are And balancing that deaf and mineral over impulse ? earth, has reared it right Words surrounded and over-ran him to come to real stature stare ? able you, and you feel to be in the with light aspirates more The sphyjix of the final fact when poets apparently mouth of a vast cave, in He was dozing.
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