His prison is the earth: Ted Hughes
bluetrace: Rilke about Rodin: “Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.”
(Thanks for the answer!)
Excerpt from CW Interview during Adelaide Festival Book Week, March 1976.
- CLAUDIA WRIGHT: I was just wondering…You’ve brought your father out here to Australia. And you were saying before that most people, you know, who are poets…sort of start off, from ordinary families – the ordinary background – was that your background or not?
- TED HUGHES: Yes. I was trying to think of some English writer who – English poet who, returning to his family and presenting his poems would have been regarded as a monster. But you imagine that Shakespeare would have been quite well understood, but would have been reprimanded. You would think of just the great ones, obviously. Keats, I imagine, they would have just shaken their heads. Wordsworth? They’d probably have told him to come to his senses. After, you know, from the 18th, 19th century, I think whatever it was that developed in England – you call it a kind of philistinism, but it isn’t that – it’s a resistance to that flexibility of mind and feeling that developed among almost everybody in England, and it’s part of English culture, to regard poets as outcasts, vagabonds, somebody who is getting away with it. And every development of literature seemed to justify this. Maybe less so now, but at any time in the last 300 years. Less so in the last 30 years that at any other time in the last 300
Craig Raine meets Ted Hughes
In the event, after poking about, he finds neither, but we come to the beehives. ‘Now, this is interesting,’ he says and points to the mouth of the hive. Two bees are having a tussle with a third. He explains to my daughter that there are robber bees and that two guard bees are ejecting the intruder from the hive. After they have flown ten feet, the two bees drop their burden. Hughes immediately examines it. ‘No, it’s a dead bee. They must have been undertaker bees.’ My daughter is wide-eyed at all this lore. So am I.
Later the same day, he produces a dowsing twig, shows me how to hold it and sends me in the rough direction of where he knows there is underground water. ‘You’re a poet, you’ll be able to do it.’ I come back a little crestfallen. Nothing has happened. ‘So much for my poetry,’ I say. ‘I can’t do it either,’ he replies and we roar with laughter.
From Haydn and the Valve Trumpet: Literary essays by Craig Raine
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“The newly published letters of Ted Hughes make no mention of his political life. But nature for the former poet laureate was more than a source of poetry. Seeing his beloved rivers and moors dying pushed him into a second career - as a fearless environmental activist.”
Essay: The Nationalisation of Ted Hughes (Kate Clanchy)
The Nationalisation of Ted Hughes
This essay is about the teaching of poetry in schools. You may think you’re not interested. Before you decide it is a dull subject in general, though, try this parlour game. Sit round with a group of friends and make a list of fifteen twentieth-century poems that children should have read by age sixteen. Pass the lists round anonymously, and guess whose belong to whom, on grounds of politics, prudery, and sheer nostalgia. Then decide whose list is best, for youth and for the nation. If the Kiplingites seem likely to have a stand-up fight with the Plathites, remind them of the bit of ‘If’ about keeping their heads when all around are losing theirs.
(Source: poetrymagazines.org.uk)
Ted Hughes - The Warm and the Cold
Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.
And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.
Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.
Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.
But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.
The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.
The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.
Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.
Such a frost
The flimsy moon
Has lost her wits.
A star falls.
The sweating farmers
Turn in their sleep
Like oxen on spits.
“TED HUGHES’S influence on Michael Longley is less remarked than his influence on Longley’s better-known contemporary, Seamus Heaney. In this essay I want to set out the reasons why Longley was drawn to Hughes’s work and the consequences for his poetic evolution. Focusing on Longley’s collections up to and including The Echo Gate, I will look at a number of areas of shared concern, both formal and thematic. These will include poems about animals, corpses, and war, poems that pursue balance as a formal principle, and poems that make extensive use of metonymy.”
*Hailed “a superstar” of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy has also become a Robin Hood figure since being made Poet Laureate in 2009.
“Clearly the honour of versifying Prince William’s wedding and receiving 477 litres of finest Buckingham Palace sherry have been reward enough for Duffy because she has given away her £5,750 honorarium to create a poetry prize named after a previous laureate, Ted Hughes. The annual sum now goes to the Poetry Society, which runs the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Hughes took the laureate post more seriously than most: he was a friend of Prince Charles, and read bedtime stories to the young princes William and Harry at Highgrove. “
Click the link to view the full article.
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.
We stand;…
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