Ecocritical Reading in the Poetry of Ted Hughes
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Ecocritical Reading in the Poetry of Ted Hughes Chaiyon Tongsukkaeng Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2015 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his/her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Chaiyon Tongsukkaeng iii Acknowledgements This thesis would have never been completed without the guidance of my committee members (Professor David Fairer and Dr Mark Wormald), assistance from friends, and support from my family. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Fiona D. Becket for her excellent guidance, caring patience, provision of a vibrant atmosphere for doing research, and dedication to correcting my writing. Her encouragement has motivated me to explore ecocriticism. I am grateful to Associate Professor Dr David Higgins for his productive critique of my work and the Environmental Humanities Research Group that inspires my interest in these interdisciplinary studies. Special thanks to Sara Brio, my Writing Mentor who helped me develop my writing skills. I would like to thank my postgraduate colleagues in the School of English, University of Leeds including Helen Price, Emma Trott, Ragini Mohite, Hannah Copley, and Mick Wood. My experience in Yorkshire would not have been so rich and valuable without Michael Mann, whose introduction to this region has greatly inspired my study in Hughes’s poetry. For me, the completion of this PhD has been such a great achievement due to the financial support from the Thai Government Scholarship Program for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Thailand’s Office of the Higher Education Commission and the Office of Educational Affairs, The Royal Thai Embassy, London. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Western Languages and Linguistics, Mahasarakham University, Thailand. Finally, I am especially grateful to my mother Nooniam Kaengkham for her unconditional love, endless support, and my family’s encouragement with best wishes beyond monetary value. iv Abstract This thesis explores Ted Hughes’s poetry between the 1950s and 1980s, focusing on an emergent eco-poetics and environmental consciousness in his representations of animals, environments, and natural phenomena. Whereas Hughes’s work has been studied in terms of animals, myths, and history, reading his poetry ecocritically brings rigorous focus to refine the idea of ‘nature’ and address questions of ecological interconnectedness and environmentalism. Engaging with wilderness/wildness in nature, this thesis discusses how poetic language appeals to the unknowability of other-than-human creatures through Hughes’s fascination with creative-destructive forces. His poetry addresses issues of animal subjectivity and environmental ethics in relation to endangered species and wildlife extinction. This study also investigates Hughes’s reinvention of the georgic and elegy through examinations of farm labour and animal husbandry, through which poetic imagination memorialises the deceased farm custodian in the earth. Furthermore, this thesis examines the earth’s natural history and cultural memory to demonstrate Hughes’s eco-poetics of the Yorkshire bioregion in light of Heidegger’s notions of poetic ‘dwelling’ and in relation to the Industrial Revolution, Methodism, and experiences of war. Hughes’s environmental imagination of stones and mill ruins reveal nature as a ‘standing reserve’ and implicate natural history in human history. Finally, Hughes investigates the fluvial environment as the chief muse of poetic creativity and the dynamic ‘riverscape’ where the activity of fishing reveals human contemplation of selfhood, beyond anthropocentrism. Hughes’s poetry bears witness to an environmental consciousness which finds a language of the unknown world of external nature, as a site of ecological integrity. v Table of Contents Introduction...................................................................................................................1 Chapter I Contact with the Wild: Redefining Nature and Poetic Creativity in Representations of Animals and Environments..................................25 • The idea of Nature and wilderness/wildness................................................25 • Wilderness as wildness: independent and violent energy..........................29 • Unknowability and Otherness in the non-human......................................42 • The question of hunting and environmental justice...................................53 • Wildlife habitat and endangered species ...................................................60 • Causal processes and mechanisms in nature.............................................73 Chapter II Moortown Diary: The Modern Georgic; the Ethic of Care in the Human- Animal Relationship; Elegy..................................................................91 • Modern Georgic: the reinvention of Pastoral..............................................93 • Managing the farmland ..............................................................................97 • Hard labour: controlling animals and mastering a machine.......................103 • Animal husbandry and the ethic of care....................................................110 • Elegy and the natural environment............................................................129 Chapter III Geographical Memory, Machine Technology and Bioregionalism: Rewriting the Environment in Remains of Elmet.................................155 • Cultural memory and literary geography...................................................157 • The Calder Valley: the body of ecology and ‘dwelling’..............................159 • The geological and the socio-cultural history of Elmet...............................172 • Human (local/national) stories and natural history.....................................187 vi • Technology, Nature as a ‘Standing Reserve’, and industrialism..............197 • Ecological, economic, and cultural values................................................202 • Bioregionalism and Yorkshire..................................................................214 Chapter IV A Poetics of River: Riverscapes and Environmental Politics.............226 • Ecological interconnectedness and environmental conservation................228 • Aquatic mechanism: the ‘muse’ of the torrent............................................231 • Fishing in the ‘Riverscape’: contemplating the self…................................241 • Protean riverine environments.....................................................................252 • The salmon’s journey: the ecological cycle.................................................273 • Hughes’s environmental politics and a question of influence.....................289 Conclusion..................................................................................................................303 Bibliography..........................................................................................................313 1 Ecocritical Reading in the Poetry of Ted Hughes Introduction I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. (‘The Thought-Fox’, 1-4, p. 21)1 This thesis considers how Ted Hughes’s writing process and poetic imagination are influenced by his external environment. In these lines from ‘The Thought-Fox’, the temporality of night creates an immediate environment of which the poetic speaker is conscious. Revealing clues about poetic creativity and its relation to the natural world, ‘The Thought-Fox’ brings together the act of writing with an idea of wilderness and indirectly reflects the poet’s environmental awareness. Here, literature and the environment are brought into focus at the point when poetic imagining and external nature merge. Hughes’s work explores the interactions of other creatures, plants, and natural elements in relation to human intervention, construction, and destruction of external environments. This thesis sheds light on the distinction between, and the integration of, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism which reveal Hughes’s poetic creativity and environmental imagination; Hughes’s examination of the nature-culture dichotomy will be debated within an anthropocentric framework that will bridge the divide between the two ideas. Whereas some critics discuss Hughes’s poetry in terms of the pastoral and 1 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. by Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 21. The poems quoted in this thesis are derived from this book. 2 wilderness,2 this thesis argues that Hughes re-evaluates the idea of wilderness in distinctive environments which include other-than-human creatures, both wild and domesticated, and rural landscapes such as farmlands and human communities, through an ecological approach. Through the lens of ecocriticism, therefore, this thesis deals with Hughes’s poetic creativity and environmental imagination, through a consideration of his conception of ‘nature’, which, at different times, both excludes and includes the human. Animals are significantly re-imagined in Hughes’s poetry as having independent and often problematic agency in relation to human subjects.