The Ted Hughes Society Journal Volume VI Issue 2 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. Written consent should be requested from the copyright holder before reproducing content for personal and/or educational use; requests for permission should be addressed to the Editor. Commercial copying is prohibited without written consent. Contents Editorial ......................................................................................................................4 List of abbreviations of works by Ted Hughes ......................................................... 6 Hughes’s Notion of Shamanic Healing ...................................................................... 7 Terry Gifford Hughes and Lawrence ............................................................................................. 24 Neil Roberts Like Fury: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at Cambridge ......................................... 40 Heather Clark Irishwards: Ted Hughes, Freedom and Flow ......................................................... 58 Mark Wormald The Parochial Courage of Ted Hughes ....................................................................78 Steve Ely Mayday on Holderness: Ted Hughes, National Service, and East Yorkshire ........ 86 James Underwood Reviews .................................................................................................................... 99 Contributors ........................................................................................................... 106 3 Editorial Though this issue may be the second of Volume VI of this Journal, it is in several other respects – at least one of which members will already have noticed, and I hope enjoyed – an important first. While a face-lift is alas beyond the hope of its editor, the beauty of the Society’s website, designed as it is maintained so scrupulously by James Robinson, had begun to feel like the gentlest kind of reproach to the journal it hosts. At any rate, it offered an opportunity for the Journal to scrub up too, and our membership secretary David Troupes has risen magnificently to this benign challenge. I hope you like the look of it, and that the new clean lines of the journal’s design and font – Merryweather, however appropriate that feels for the poet of ‘Wind’ and ‘Bringing in New Couples’ and ‘Stump Pool in April’ – make the experience of reading its contents even more satisfying. The contents themselves represent the first fruits of an outstandingly successful inaugural colloquium hosted in June 2017 by the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield on the theme of Ted Hughes and Place. The next issue will contain a selection of the many excellent presentations an international gathering heard over two full days, and will be guest-edited by James Underwood. But the current issue contains the plenary lectures that book-ended those long mid- summer days, revised for publication by the speakers and are presented here, along with versions of the papers given by the colloquium’s hosts, Steve Ely and James himself. Between them, these contributions do respond to the theme, sometimes literally – Cambridge, Ireland and East Yorkshire are among the precincts revisited here – sometimes from different kinds of heights. Shamanic healing in Hughes’s work, inflected and informed by his environmental consciousness, might to the uninitiated seem a long way from the importance, hitherto largely overlooked, of D. H. Lawrence for Hughes, but all kinds of connections between these two discursive and imaginative terrains are opened up by Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts. Heather Clark’s fascinating account of Hughes and Plath in Cambridge, informed by the publication this autumn of the first volume of Plath’s Collected Letters, which she also reviews in this issue, also marks an important step into the wealth of new material those letters reveal about their creative partnership, and represents an important instalment in her new biography of Plath, which is nearing completion. And Ireland and Irishness features in at least three of these presentations, most 4 extensively my own, which I am grateful to Terry Gifford for editing. When six Hughes scholars, two doctoral students among them, presented papers in November 2017 at the Plath conference at the University of Ulster in Belfast, and extended invitations to Plath scholars to return the compliment by joining us at the next international Hughes conference, Poetry in the Making, to be hosted at Gregynog Hall in Powys in August 2018 by Carrie Smith and the University of Cardiff, it felt both like the consolidation of an Irish bridgehead, and the opening of a new and more positive chapter in relations between communities of scholars too often separated by perceptions of contested literary history. All Hughes readers are hawk-eyed, of course, so will not need me to tell you that the list of abbreviations of texts likely to feature in contributions to this journal has just grown a little longer, to reflect this confidence. Finally, it was in the hope that scholarship of high quality will reach the wider readership it deserves, and that the excellent progress towards enlargement of the membership of the Ted Hughes Society over recent months will continue, that at a meeting of its Council in Huddersfield in June the last of this issue’s innovations was decided. This is the moment at which the Journal steps from behind its firewall and into open access, catching up with the realities of academic expectations and a number of recent precedents. Members of the Council, as well as the Journal’s editor, trust that the Journal’s readers will help us spread the word. Mark Wormald Pembroke College Cambridge 5 List of abbreviations of works by Ted Hughes CB Cave Birds (London: Faber & Faber, 1978) 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) IM The Iron Man (London: Faber & Faber, illustrated by Andrew Davison, 1985 [1968]) IW The Iron Woman (London: Faber & Faber, 1993) MW Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1976) PC Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, Poet and Critic (London: The British Library, 2012) PM Poetry in the Making (London: Faber & Faber, 1989 [1967]) RE Remains of Elmet (London: Faber & Faber, 1979) SGCB Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1992) UNS Under the North Star (London: Faber & Faber, 1981) WP Winter Pollen (London: Faber & Faber, 1994) WT What is the Truth? (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) And by Sylvia Plath LSP1 The Collected Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen Kukil (London: Faber & Faber, 2017) 6 Hughes’s Notion of Shamanic Healing Terry Gifford In January of last year an obituary in The Guardian caught my eye. The painter Derek Hyatt was said by his obituarist, the art historian Tim Barringer, to have ‘collaborated […] with the poet Ted Hughes, whose work he greatly admired’.1 Derek Hyatt’s name appears in Sagar and Tabor’s Ted Hughes: A Bibliography in entry A47 since, as a lecturer at Leeds Polytechnic, he and his students made broadsides for Hughes poems exhibited at the 1975 Ilkley Literature Festival. Hyatt’s triptych etching for ‘Wodwo’ included the complete text of the poem. But five years earlier Hyatt had made an oil painting given the title of the poem ‘Wodwo’; this is reproduced in Derek Hyatt and Peter Woodcock’s 2001 book Stone Fires-Liquid Clouds: The Shamanic Art of Derek Hyatt which was the result of three years of correspondence and interviews with Hyatt.2 However, at an exhibition of Hyatt’s work at the Art Space Gallery in London last year I talked to his daughter, Sally Gallagher, to discover that she had found no correspondence from Hughes in her father’s papers, and in the exhibition catalogue essay Tim Barringer this time makes no mention of Hughes. Intriguingly, Stone Fires-Liquid Clouds includes an essay by Hyatt titled, ‘Wodwo, Ted Hughes and The Wounded Healer’ about Hyatt’s reading of Hughes as an inspirational shamanic artist. Hyatt writes: ‘It’s a pity that we can’t hold our poets in greater respect for the dangers they go through to make deep poetry’.3 But he makes no argument for his title and it is left to Woodcock to explain it in his introductory remarks: ‘In Hyatt’s view, Hughes was a wounded healer, a poet of intense power and shamanic qualities whose recognition was overshadowed by the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath’.4 In his book The Ethnopoetics of Shamanism (2014), the Brazilian literary scholar Marcel de Lima offers the following definition of the shaman: 1 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/13/derek-hyatt