“Poetry in the Making”: Ted Hughes and the Art of Writing Submitted By
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1 “Poetry in the Making”: Ted Hughes and the Art of Writing Submitted by Carrie Rachael Smith to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in April 2013 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. 2 Abstract This study takes as its focus Ted Hughes’s composition techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote affected the style and subject matter of his work. Hughes’s poetry has lent itself to a number of familiar critical approaches, focusing on his preoccupation with mythology, his interaction with the natural world and his creative partnership with his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Yet no study, until now, has looked systematically at his literary drafts and the extent to which Hughes’s method of composition radically altered during his writing career. Archive material at Emory University, accessible since 2000, and new archive materials held at the British Library and made available for study for the first time in 2010, have opened up possibilities for much greater depth of research into Hughes’s writing processes and the birth and evolution of individual poems. By engaging with these materials, my research complements new studies which are tackling under- examined areas of Hughes’s work, whilst contributing more broadly to an increased awareness of the central importance of archival work in the study of literature. Literary manuscript drafts have often been used to study writers whose writing methods consciously foreground the drafting process. Whilst Hughes has not previously been considered in this light, my original investigations into his archival materials reveal a poet for whom the nature of the compositional process was a central concern which defines and redefines his poetry across his career. 3 Contents List of Illustrations Transcription of Manuscripts Introduction 1. ‘The Ted Hughesness of Ted Hughes’: Composition and Authenticity in Hughes’s Readings and Recordings 2. The Professional Poet: The Transition from the Drafts of The Hawk in the Rain to the Process of Lupercal 3. The Evolution of ‘Skylarks’: A Case Study 4. Searching ‘for the right masks’: Tracing the Compositional Processes of Crow 5. Collaborative Composition: Negotiating Word and Image in the Drafts of Cave Birds 6. Writing Truth and the Truth of Writing: The Spontaneous Composition of Moortown Diary Conclusion: Birthday Letters: An Archive of Writing Bibliography 4 List of Illustrations Figure 1 – Sample of Hughes’s early hand, letter to Olwyn Hughes from Cambridge, Early 1950s, Atlanta, Emory University, Manuscript and Rare Book Library, MSS980, Box 1, Fol. 2 Figure 2 – Example of Hughes’s early handwritten ‘g’, letter to Olwyn Hughes, MSS980, Box 1, Fol. 2 Figure 3 – Example of Hughes’s late handwritten ‘g’, ‘Lovesong’ draft, Atlanta, Emory University, Manuscript and Rare Book Library, Ted Hughes papers, 1940-1997, MSS644, Box 61, Fol. 27 Figure 4 – Letter from Ted Hughes to Olwyn with short hand marks. MSS980, Box 1, Fol. 2 Figure 5 – Cover of The Poet Speaks (Argos, 1965) Figure 6 – Cover of Ted Hughes: Reading his Poetry (Harper Collins, 1984) Figure 7 – Cover of Poetry in the Making (BBC, 2000) Figure 8 – Cover of The Poetry and Voice of Ted Hughes (Caedmon, 1977) Figure 9 – Detail from ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ drafts, MSS644, Box 57, Fol. 1 Figure 10 – Detail from ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ drafts showing two different colours of inks, MSS644, Box 57, Fol. 1 Figure 11 - Extract from draft of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, MSS644, Box 57, Fol. 1 Figure 12 – Letter from John Irving, ‘Ted Hughes Talks File 1, 1956-1962’, BBC Written Archive Figure 13 – Comparison between ‘Notebook 1’, Emory, MSS644, OBV1 and ‘Wodwo Notebook’ Figure 14 – Envelope March 1961, from Hughes’s parents, with an early version of ‘Skylarks’ drafted on verso, MSS644, Box 60, Fol. 11 Figure 15 – Draft of ‘Warm Moors’, Notebook 1, MSS644, OBV1 Figure 16 – 1973 album cover of Crow recording Figure 17 – First imprint of Modern Poetry in Translation Figure 18 – Notes within Add MS 88918/7/2, Edward James Hughes Papers, London, British Library Figure 19 – First draft of ‘Littleblood’, MSS644, Box 61, Fol. 25 and second draft of ‘Littleblood’, MSS644, Box 57, Fol. 5 Figure 20 – ‘The Knight’, Baskin image, University of Exeter, Special Edition of Cave Birds, EUL MS350/1/1 Figure 21 – Manuscript draft page from ‘The Knight’, University of Exeter, GB 0029, EUL MS 58/A/14 Figure 22 – ‘The Plaintiff’, Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama (New York: The Viking Press, 1978) Figure 23- ‘The Hanged Man’ by Leonard Baskin Figure 24 – Detail from the manuscript draft of ‘Orf’, MSS644, Box 69, Fol. 12 Figure 25 – Drafts of ‘Bringing in New Couples’, MSS644, Box 68, Fol. 72 and ‘Orf’, MSS644, Box 69, Fol. 12 Figure 26 – Detail from notes within Add MS 88918/7/2, Edward James Hughes Papers, British Library Figure 27 – Manuscript of ‘March morning unlike others’, MSS644, Box 69, Fol. 9 Figure 28 - Two drafts of ‘The day he died’ illustrating different handwriting size, MSS644, Box 68, Fol. 75 Figure 29 - Extract from Moore’s letter to Plath, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College Figure 30 – Photograph of Sylvia Plath, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes 5 Figure 31 – Detail from Plath’s manuscript draft ‘Edge’, Smith College 6 Transcription of Manuscripts The depiction of poetic drafts in print criticism is a difficult issue. Various studies have informed my representation of them in this thesis. Hughes discussed the print presentation of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts in his introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Work (1968). Commenting on the tendency to normalise her characteristic dashes, he writes, ‘Emily Dickinson’s eccentric dashes are an integral part of her method and style, and cannot be translated to commas, semicolons and the rest without deadening the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems’.1 Even when Dickinson’s dashes are maintained, Susan Howe finds them an unsatisfactory transcription of the poems, which were not committed to print during the poet’s lifetime. Howe believes that there is intention behind all the marks on the manuscripts and that the angle of one of Dickinson’s dashes can bring new meaning to a poem.2 How can a manuscript be represented accurately? In Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, Tim Kendall represents Plath’s manuscripts in the following way: ‘Red, mottled, like cut throats| The throats of Jews’.3 Kendall allows the reader to grasp the development and mutation of Plath’s thought throughout the manuscript and elucidates the effect of her final word choice on the finished poem. He touches on the moral issue of representing a manuscript in print which is not the final version the author intended to be seen. He notes that Plath’s removal of the image quoted above is ‘fortunate’ as it is ‘potentially offensive’, and yet through printing the drafts readers have access to such material.4 If the moral issue is placed to one side, Kendall’s visual 1 Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. by William Scammell (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 154. 2 Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), p. 39. 3 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 112. 4 Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p. 112. 7 representation of Plath’s drafts could be perceived as problematic in a similar way to those of Dickinson. A single line strike-through does not give adequate representation to the vehemence of some of Plath’s scribbling out, nor does it acknowledge the ambiguity created by Plath’s use of arrows or the presence of two words squashed into one space. The answer to this problem is never quite satisfactory. I have chosen to combine the work of Kendall and others such as Jon Stallworthy in his Vision and Revision in Yeats’s ‘Last Poems’ with that of Howe, who uses typed versions with photocopies of Dickinson’s handwritten marks in between the typed words. In addition, where relevant I have described the type of paper and pen used, the manner in which a line is crossed out or the angle at which a replacement line is inserted, as well as using images of the manuscripts themselves. I have used single-line strike-through to indicate authorial crossing out of a word or line; I have tried to indicate in my writing any extra relevant detail, for example, concerning the severity of crossing out. I have used square brackets to indicate when a word in the transcription is uncertain and square brackets with asterisks where a word is completely illegible. If a whole line is inserted after the main drafting I have used ^^ around the line to indicate this. I have used { when showing that a word is written over another word in the same space. When a word is added to a line I have transcribed it above the line and only used ^ when Hughes has done so in the draft. I have also used smaller font if an addition is written in a particularly small hand. If a word is added to the beginning of the line, I have set it further to the left of the line, as it is in the draft, but as Hughes generally uses a capital letter at the beginning of each line, two capital letters in a row also help to indicate an addition at the beginning of a line.