Transcript Shock-maker who shook English verse.

Ted Hughes
Andrew Motion
by N.A.Puzanova
Ted Hughes: Shock-maker who
shook English verse
• Ted Hughes over the past 40 years has
changed the landscape of his country’s
verse. His poetry always provoked shocks
in his readers.
• His poems revealed the violence of the
natural world. No one expected him to
publish anything while still alive about his
relationship with Sylvia Plath-let alone a
work of such anguish, frankness and heartbreaking tenderness.
• The raw emotional openness to many
seemed radically at odds with the public
image of Hughes as the tight-lipped
Yorkshireman. There is no doubt that
Birthday Letters has caused many
people to reassess Hughes’s work, and it
now seems fitting and touching that his
most affecting collection should be the
last book to be published in his lifetime.
• Hughes arrived dramatically on the
literary scene with the publication of the
Hawk in the Rain, 1957. English verse
was then dominated with ironic
middlebrow detachment as exemplifies
by figures like Philip Larkin and
Kingsley Amis. Hughes's poetry , full of
heat of animal life, couldn’t have been
more different.
• His “unfashionable” influences were announced
from the start: the vigorous rhythms of Hopkins,
the individualism of D.H. Lawrence.
• Hughes’s poetry has changed the landscape of
English verse. In 1962, Hughes was one of the
poets chosen by Al.Alvarez for the groundbreaking anthology, the New Poetry.
• Hughes’s use of his local vernacular has helped
to democratize poetry in England. Perhaps the
most significant development in post-war poetry
is the way in which a range of regional voices
has begun to be heard
• It is Hughes’s focus on the natural world for
which he is most famous, and there's is no
doubt that he will be remembered by the
bulk of his readers for his animal poems.
Again, this aspect of his work has marked a
significant shift in contemporary poetry,
away for the metropolitan ironies and
anxieties that had been so dominant since
the birth of modernism-embodied by the
influential AH Auden, Stephen Spender and
the decaying city of TS Eliot’s The Waste
Land.
• In Hughes social trauma manifests itself
in the rank individualism of his celebrated
animals: The Jaguar ignoring its cage, the
Hawk Roosting, who declares, “Nothing
has changed since I began”.
• Human beings appear to be living out
some meaningless cosmic joke, devoid of
choice. They are responsible for the
“turmoil of history”.
• His most important critical work includes
Shakespeare and the Complete Goddess of
being- where he explores along with some
other themes Englishness.
• His last works, his superb translation Tales
from Ovid and Birthday letters show
Hughes at the height of his astonishing
poetic powers. BL is considered to be a
work of greatness.
Andrew Motion
• The appointment of Andrew Motion as Poet
Laureate, after months of waiting since Ted
Hughes's death in October, 1998 has
generated predictable and un-literary
excitement. Motion was described as
relatively obscure. No one reads Andrew,
one fellow poet was reports as saying.
• Part of this hostility has nothing to do with
the poetry itself, but with Motion’s
“establishment credentials”. Educated at
Radley public school and oxford, he has been
an editor of Poetry Review magazine and
during the late 80s, poetry editor at publishers
Chatto and Windus. Latterly he has held a
position with the Arts Council. He had been a
lecturer at the University of hull when his
first volume, The Pleasure Steamer, was
published .
• His main work was that of a biographer,
most famously of Philip Larkin.
• Motion’s earliest work was narrativedriven-one collection was called secret
Narratives-and seemed to be assimilation
into poetry the novelistic concept of the
“unreliable narrator”. The stories are
elliptical, hinting at something darker
beneath. But it was in his prose poem
Staking that Motion unveiled his main
motivation the crucial event underlying
nearly all his work.
• He recounted his child hood memories of
his mother, right up to the moment she
suffered a riding accident. She fractured
her skull and suffered damage to the
brain. It took her three years to come out
of the ensuing come and to gradually
relearn her speech: it took her 10 years in
all to die, without having left the hospital.
• This account is terrible . Its earlier
anecdotes about his being bullied at prep
school are told with out self-pity, but are
chocking enough. The riding accident
occurs again and again in his work. The
sense of loss haunts all of his poems.
• Even in the narrative pieces loss is the key
note.
• And it is interesting that Motion applied his
attention so skillfully to biographies – of
Edward Thomas, another poet one
associated with premature loss: of Keats,
taken young as he drowned in his own
blood, of an course, of Larkin, the poet of
low expectation and morbid stoicism.
• In Love in a Life (1991), Motion writes about
vulnerability and wounding in adult life. Why do
I feel that I‘ve died and am lingering here to
haunt you? He says at one point, and over and
over the idea recurs: ”I am your home, if you
ever arrive; I am dead; I am also alive” these are
premature elegies, some written almost with the
guilt of the survivor.
• The long poem, A Blow to The Head, takes as its
point de depart an unprovoked attack on his wife
in a Paris train, and considers other head wounds
and their consequences
• Before the awful yet inevitable elision
of wife and mother
• I fit myself
• Along her spine/ but dare not touch/ her
breaking skull/ and find my mother/
return to me /as if she was climbing /out
a a well/ ginger with bruises/, hair
shaved off,/ her spongy crown/ is ripe
with blood.
• And that image of drowning is also
elided, elsewhere in the volume, with
recurrent images of the friend who
drowned in the disaster. It is
perhaps small wonder that Motion is
so alert to the ever-present
possibility of accident, violence,
death, but it would be unfair to
suppose that these subjects were
treated hysterically. On the contrary,
the icy control, in diction and form,
with which he forma these anecdotes
and apprehension, is effective.