The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Ted Hughes

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

I’ve moved on from the “Modern” volume, and am now in the “Contemporary” volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.

Ted Hughes makes people angry. His name was repeatedly defaced off of Plath’s grave by Plath fanatics, who live their lives in a state of mania and rage at this man who “caused” the death of their goddess. No. He didn’t cause it. The man had an affair. He didn’t invade a small country, he didn’t kill a puppy, he had an affair. Lots of people have affairs. It sucks, but it’s not a crime on the level of genocide or something. His affair did have an unbelievably tragic and horrifying aftermath, something which he obviously could not foresee at the time. Plath had a history of mental illness and had tried to commit suicide before. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas (Nicholas recently killed himself, and I am so emotionally involved with this entire group of people that I remember thinking, “I am so glad that his father did not live to see this” and also, “Poor Frieda.” Just a tragedy.) Hughes was the executor of Plath’s estate, a situation which enraged the Plath-ians, because he was the Devil, don’t you understand. But he, a world-famous poet himself, went along with the sad job of editing her Collected Poems, editing her last volume Ariel, and also editing her journals (his most controversial job ever). I suppose he could never have pleased anyone. He made decisions in the editing which still rankle. I get that Plath was his wife, but she was also a public figure, and my view is: her work belongs to me more than it belongs to him.

Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, wrote an article, on the re-publication of Ariel in its original order (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (P.S.)) – its first posthumous publication, under Ted Hughes’s editorship, was ironed out into a chronological order:

Criticism of my father was even levelled at his ownership of my mother’s copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me. Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise.

After my mother’s suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruel things were written about my father that bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought me up – later with the help of my stepmother. All the time, he kept alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so I felt as if she were watching over me, a constant presence in my life.

It appeared to me that my father’s editing of Ariel was seen to “interfere” with the sanctity of my mother’s suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous. For me, as her daughter, everything associated with her was miraculous, but that was because my father made it appear so, even playing me a record of my mother reading her poetry so I could hear her voice again. It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father’s more temperate and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father’s work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. I’d been aghast that my perfect image of her, attached to my last memories, was so unbalanced. But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me. The outbursts were the exception, not the rule. Life at home was generally quiet, and my parents’ relationship was hardworking and companionable. However, as her daughter, I needed to know the truth of my mother ‘s nature – as I did my father’s – since it was to help me understand my own.

Frieda Hughes’s voice is a welcome change to the usual dialogue about Hughes. She is quite a good writer herself.

Hughes supposedly destroyed the last two years of Plath’s journal, because they were too painful for him to look at. While I understand where he is coming from, I still wish that I could read those last two years. About 10 years ago, the “unabridged” version of Plath’s journals came out, but those two years were still not listed, so please: don’t call them “unabridged” then. Yes, there was a lot more in this volume than what was in the volume before, which I read until it fell apart. But those two final journals remain missing. I still have hopes that they will turn up. That they actually were not destroyed. That his witch-sister Olwyn (now she really is the Devil, I declare it) had hidden them away, because she saw herself as the gatekeeper of the Hughes honor, and she had never liked Sylvia anyway. A couple of months ago, my friend Cara, another Plath fan, wrote an awesome international-thriller piece, starring myself, Cara, and Tracey, and – well, you’ll just have to read it for yourself.

Following Plath’s suicide in 1963, Hughes moved in with Assia Wevill, the woman with whom he had had an affair during his marriage to Plath. He must have been crazy at that time. My heart goes out to him. Assia took care of Frieda and Nicholas, who were only babies at that time. She was pregnant herself, with Hughes’s child, and in 1965 she gave birth to a little girl they named Shura. No one can know what goes on behind closed doors, although there’s plenty of nasty speculation, something I have no interest in. I’m basically on Hughes’s side in all of this, or let’s say I can see his side. No one has an affair thinking, “Hopefully my wife will kill herself from her grief.” To assign that sort of malevolent motive to this man, who obviously was a bit wild, is unfair to the nth degree (I mean, Sylvia knew that from the start – their “meeting” wasn’t going out for Cherry Cokes at the drivein – they met wasted at a literary party and made out within minutes of meeting each other, and Plath bit his cheek. They were married 4 months later. So the signs were there. These were both volatile intense people.) I also don’t believe in judging him harshly. So he liked crazy women. That’s obvious. So? Should the man be burned on a pyre of hate for all time because he was drawn to crazy women? Horrifyingly, Assia imitated Plath’s suicide in 1969, only she upped the ante, killing their young daughter along herself. I do not blame Hughes for that. I blame Assia. Hughes must have … I have no idea. Such an experience is so outside of normal life, I can’t imagine how he bore it.

Ted Hughes, in a heartwrenching letter to Lucas Myers, on September 29, 1984, referred to those terrible years:

I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors – but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.

That just breaks my heart. That’s from the recent publication of Letters of Ted Hughes, a book I have yet to read, unfortunately. It’s been on my Must-Read list ever since it came out.

Okay. Now let’s talk about his poetry, shall we? I just had to get all of the personal stuff out of the way. Hughes has always been a controversial figure, not just because of his horrible and famous personal life, but because of his poetry, which is fierce, violent, bloody, and very much out of the tenor of his particular time. You read the work of his contemporaries (especially in the 50s, when he was becoming famous), and you can feel the difference. His poems are frightening. There is a primal energy at work, nature being red in tooth and claw and all that. Hughes is all about that red in tooth and claw.

Calvin Bedient wrote, in re: Hughes:

His weakness is not violence but the absolute egotism of survival. It is the victor he loves, not war.

It was one of the things that drew Plath to him. You can feel his influence in her poetry at that time. She was such a cerebral thing, so mannered and precocious, not to mention self-centered (which is one of the best parts of her poetry). But after meeting him, she suddenly starts writing about owls and rabbits and bogs … perhaps trying to turn her glance outwards a bit. It’s some of her nicest work. There is a symbiosis at work here, and you can feel her influence on him as well.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes:

She [Plath] is the deliberate poet, she devises strategies, she competes for space and attention. She is experimental, setting herself exercises. She is an ironist. If the energies of their language at times seem comparable, they flow from different sources and it was more than their human proximity than a sense of common poetic objectives that make them seem so close in their marked differences, their incompatabilities.

But enough about Plath. I’ll get to her later on my Poetry Bookshelf. Oh, you can bet I will.

The Norton Anthology introduction to Hughes says:

When he looked at nature, he found predators and victims; when he showed nature looking at humanity, as in “Crow’s First Lesson,” the same dynamic appeared. The poet’s imagination whirls with increasing wildness, until some readers long for modulations of this baleful glare. Such ferocity, however, is so rare in English poetry, and Hughes was so effective as its exponent, that he gripped a considerable audience. He could not have done so by subject alone: his compression, his daring vocabulary, and his jarring rhythms all contributed. In contrast to the rational lucidity and buttoned-up form of his English contemporaries in the Movement such as Philip Larkin and Donald Davie, Hughes fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems, embodied in violent metaphors, blunt syntax, harsh alliterative clusters, bunched stresses, incantatory repetitions, insistent assonances, and a dark, brooding tone.

It’s powerful stuff. I love it. He’s one of the few poets who can actually take my breath away when reading some of his work. And yes, sometimes it’s TOO intense. You need a break from it. But imagine what it must have been like for HIM. Hughes was a craftsman of the highest order, and he had great discipline (at least in his working habits). He was prolific, and determined. He worked HARD.

Here is Michael Schmidt, again:

A writer of many parts, he was never content to stop with poetry. He wrote stories, children’s poetry, stage pieces. He invented a “talking without words,” Orghast. He translated from the poets of Eastern Europe and, triumphantly in 1996, from Ovid. He was a powerful advocate, especially of Emily Dickinson and Keith Douglas. He was drawn to manifestations of power and to those creatures (some of them human) who manage to survive the excesses of power. Singularity, the “single mind sized skull,” intrigued him; in Shakespeare’s tragedies how a single human displaces the more complex elements of character and compels human action much as instinct compels animal action. His poem “Thrushes” is an alarming statement of this interest, seeming to celebrate pure instinct. Here is another kind of candor, a poetic commitment to theme that does not reflect on morality but on essential energy, which is not “considered speech” in Davie’s sense but “authentic speech” (some of it hard to speak aloud), the language of Heathcliff rather than Linton. Humanism is alluring but inadequate, the old symbols bankrupt.

There’s a lot in Dickinson that calls to mind Hughes: the violent imagery, the sudden pricks and cuts that pepper her work, as though life itself is an assault on her. Hughes’ animal poems are amazing. He does not anthropomorphize like D.H. Lawrence did. He observes. His poems on owls and pikes and jaguars are stunning examples of how poets often can teach us how to see. If we let them. Hughes was fascinated by the other-ness of animals, and had been from his earliest years. He was born in Yorkshire, in a wild woolly area, and grew up hunting, fishing, tramping through bogs. In a way, his poetry can be seen as a tribute to his own father, and the life his father lived, so different from the urban and academic bustle that Hughes became ensconced in. He went to Cambridge, and majored in anthropology and archaeology, another thing that set him apart from his contemporaries. While he was already well-known in literary circles when he met Plath in 1956, it wasn’t until the late 60s and early 70s that his fame became worldwide. He had other works in circulation, but he published two volumes of poetry then – Wodwo in 1967 and Crow in 1970, which brought him fame, renown, and controversy. He was always a lightning rod for controversy, and not just because of his association with Plath. His work is confrontational. Some of it is hard to take. The moral implications are sometimes dodgy, if you care about that sort of thing. What is Hughes actually saying? He was Poet Laureate. He wrote odes for the Queen Mum and Princess Diana. He was establishment. But there was always this cloud of something else over him, people didn’t know how to feel about him. He kept his counsel. It must have been difficult, as the Plath cult heated up, to not defend himself from all of the accusations. But he never said a word. Until 1998, when, right before he died, he published, to much media frenzy, Birthday Letters: Poems, a volume of poetry addressed entirely to Sylvia Plath (except for, I think, two poems. All the rest are addressed to “you”, meaning Plath). It was unbelievable, to read that book for the first time, to hear Hughes’s “version” of events (this goes along with my comments about Red Cliff, strangely enough). He knew, at that point, that he was dying. He had some things to get off his chest, before he went. Let them pick apart his corpse once he’s gone. The volume got mixed reviews, at least in terms of the poetry, but it is a fascinating and illuminating volume, and there are lines there that are heart-cracking. I actually didn’t find it defensive, as some others did, and even if he was defensive, who the hell could blame the guy? You put up with being Enemy #1 for thirty years and see how calm and placid YOU are able to remain. I found the poems to be personal, raw, honest, and complex. Life is not always simple. People don’t always behave honorably. He had suffered enough for his sins in 1962. This was a direct address to a woman he obviously had loved dearly, despite his extramarital shenanigans, a woman he thought he could save (I think he had that “savior” complex that some men have, being drawn to messed-up women they can help), a woman who was the mother of his two beloved children, and the shocking thing about the volume is that direct-address format. It’s almost unbearably intimate at times. The poems don’t feel “worked on”. They seem pretty much dashed-off, which is a total change from Hughes’s taut style in all the rest of his work. They are jarring. Totally.

Schmidt writes:

[The Birthday Letters] is a partial triumph, lacing in intimacy, a confession that must assert and reassert its sincerity, a candor that wants to be believed. At the root of the poems is love, of course, but also a complex set of angers that, in order to keep them under control, Hughes had to convey in a largely matter-of-fact prosody, writing against his cadential instincts. It is a fascinating experiment, a candor that is cold, calculated and only marginally vulnerable, the ultimate in his poetry of survival, counting the cost and discounting (obliquely) the lies that have grown around the story of two young poets and their marriage.

While, on some level, he will always be “married” to Plath, in readers’ minds, his work stands apart, and in order to get clear on his identity as a poet, it is sometimes necessary to try to get Plath out of the way, not an easy task. There are those who only read Hughes looking for “clues” as to what he was ACTUALLY saying about Plath, a tremendously boring way to look at his poetry, in my opinion. I am not saying I always succeed. I am a Plath fan from the time I was 16 years old, and I have had a lifelong relationship with her work (it grows, morphs, changes, it is never one thing), and I came to Hughes way later, although he was a huge figure to me in my mind because of his marriage to Plath. I was never one of those who thought that Hughes was the devil incarnate. He was a man. He effed up his marriage. But let’s be honest: Plath was no angel, and she cannot have been easy to live with. She felt intimidated by her husband’s work, she had demons from her childhood which gave her agonizing sometimes years-long bouts with writer’s block, and her competitive relationship with her husband was something that she could barely acknowledge. At the same time, Hughes was baffled by what was happening: He had married a POET, why was she so obsessed with housewifery? Couldn’t they just keep on being bohemian and not worry about that domestic stuff? He didn’t understand. He openly admits that in Birthday Letters. He had married her after knowing her 4 months. There was much he didn’t know. So in many ways, Plath forced him away, she needed him to be a monster, because that was the male-female dynamic she understood. Her father died when she was a child. After that, she needed men to leave her, it was essential that she keep playing out that earlier drama. She probably was not aware of all of this on a conscious level, although her poems are brutally honest about it. Hughes can’t have had an easy time of it, with her as a wife. There were two victims in that marriage. Nobody “won” here.

The poem I chose today to go along with this post is “Horses”, written in 1957. A strange connection (and sorry, but Plath can’t seem to keep herself out of this) is Plath’s famous poem “Ariel”, also about a horse at dawn, and written in the terrible autumn of 1962, after Hughes left her, and only a couple of months before she killed herself. “Ariel” has some similar elements to Hughes’s poem here, the whole “horizon” aspect – with Plath flinging herself at the horizon, with the rising sun – into the “cauldron of morning”.

But let us let Hughes’s poem speak for itself. It may not be his most famous, but it is one of my favorites of his. It really shows his power of language, his energy of image, and the strange visionary aspect of how he sees things.

Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.