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Desk poet
by John Horder
The Guardian, March 1965
Ted Hughes is the one poet to have risen since the last war whose work seems to speak to all generations. The terror and frightfulness at the end of his magnificent poem 'Mayday on Holderness' are characteristic:
The North Sea lies soundless. Beneath it
Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.
"Mother, Mother" cries the pierced helmet.
Cordite oozings of Gallipoli.
Frederick Grubb in his forthcoming book 'A Vision of Reality' has noted that Hughes’s impact is sometimes of "sterile frightfulness and morbid impasse." The tendency is certainly there in his work but at the same time he manages to face and explore a wide range of animal feelings which most of us prefer to ignore. This he does with some underlying cynicism and resignation.
His childhood offers little clue to these preoccupations. He was born and brought up in Mytholmroyd, a little Yorkshire town where his father was a joiner. He was the youngest of three children and says this made him very competitive. He has a pleasant childhood playing a lot on local frames and on the moorland. When he went to Mexborough Grammar School he was lucky in having a succession of English teachers who were enthusiastic about poetry, specially John Fisher, who is still there. At fifteen he began writing poetry in earnest.
“I can’t say much about the formative effect of my childhood”, he told me, “the most important thing it taught me was to speak West Yorkshire dialect, which is really what I write.” (Hughes still speaks in dialect.) “You know, you can hear the language under the language when you speak. The minute you have lost that feeling it has gone dead on you. Well I was lucky, the West Yorkshire dialect is both eloquent and emphatic, there are no parts of it formal or dehumanised. It gets in within whatever I write and that in turn limits what I write to form a single point of view.
"When I went to Cambridge there was a danger that I’d move over and speak the other language. Reading English was a dead-end for me and in my last year I moved over to anthropology and archaeology, which I found absorbing. I spent most of my time reading folklore and Yeats’s poems. There was a time when I knew the whole of Yeats's 'Collected Poems', including the longer ones, off by heart. These two interests helped to fertilise my imagination. I didn't need anything at Cambridge really.
"Cambridge is the ordeal for initiation into English society and it's a pity there's not another one. It's a most destructive experience and only tough poets like Peter Redgrove ever survive. When you think of it hundreds of undergraduates reading English each year all want tto write and 99 per cent simply disappear. In effect university is a prison from life in your last three or four most formative years. It's a most deadly institution unless you're aiming to be either a scholar or a gentleman."
Significantly, Hughes wrote nothing while he was at Cambridge. His first poems were written around the age of fifteen and the next when he was twenty-five. After coming down he wandered about for two years doing odd jobs, working as a rose-gardener, a night-watchman and then finally as a reader for Rank at Pinewood. "I first met Sylvia (Plath) in Falconer's Yard off Petty Cury in Cambridge eight years ago last week. I taught there for a bit while she finished off at Newnham and we got married the same year. We went off to American in 1957 where we both taught. We first lived in Northampton and then spent a fantastic year in Boston, where she was born. It's a strange and wonderful city. After that we did a slow tour round the States on the money we had put by. I don't know how we survived but we did. Neither of us made much from writing at the time.
"Sylvia was terribly efficient sending all my poems out for me and I had my first book, 'The Hawk in the Rain', taken by Harpers in America before Fabers accepted them here in 1957. There was no rivalry between us as poets or in any other way. It sounds trite but you completely influence one another if you live together. You begin to write out of one brain. Sylvia was completely original though. She may have been influenced by Stevens or Lowell in a couple of poems, but she had found her own voice. She wrote an enormous amount, eight or nine books before Heinemann took 'The Colossus', and every nine months or so the body of her manuscripts would undergo a complete change. You see, she needed to write - she could produce a characteristic poem at any time she liked.
"After we'd returned to England and were living in Chalcot Square near Primrose Hill, we would each write poetry every day. It was all we were interested in, all we ever did. We were like two feet, each one using everything the other did. It was a working partnership and it was all-absorbing. We just lived it. There was an unspoken unanimity in every criticism or judgment we made. It all fitted in very well.
“Sylvia had a great desire to write stories and novels. But the poems were works of genius. She rejected a lot which seem terribly good to me and I’ll put them in another book to follow 'Ariel' in a few years’ time. She wanted to produce these last poems more than anything else, writing under an enormous pressure. If she didn’t write anything for three days she'd be in a very bad way indeed. She'd written poems since she was a little girl…
"Sometimes I think my poems are merely notes. A lot of my second book 'Lupercal' is one extended poem about one or two sensations. There are at least a dozen or fifteen poems in that book which belong organically to one another. You'll have noticed how all the animals get killed off at the end of most poems. Each one is living the redeemed life of joy. They're continually in a state of energy which men only have when they’ve gone mad. This strength arises from their complete unity with whatever divinity they have. They would be utterly miserable, otherwise however would they manage to live?
"These spirits or powers won't be messed up by artificiality or arrangements. This is what 'The Otter' is about and 'The Bull' is what the observer sees when he looks into his own head. Mostly these powers are just waiting while life just goes by and only find an outlet in moments of purity and crisis, because they won't enter the ordinary pace and constitution of life very easily. In fact, they have a hard time in this modern world. People are energetic animals and there's no outlet in this tame corner of civilisation. Maybe if I didn't live in England I wouldn't be driven to extremes to writing about animals… My poems are not about violence but vitality. Animals are not violent, they're so much more completely controlled than men. So much more adapted to their environment. Maybe my poems are about the split personality of modern man, the one behind the constructed spoilt part." The last stanza of 'Thrushes' shows how the life of the man at the desk has completely cut across any life of the senses through which he might have reached fulfillment:
With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself - while for him
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent waters weep.
O'Brien's male
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