Hughes, Ted #

Ted Hughes is considered one of England’s greatest and most prodigious poets of the last century. Despite the controversies surrounding his domestic life with its promiscuous and masculine sexuality, his poetry gained recognition for its realistic portrayal of man in the natural world - he was closely connected to the earth; trees, fields, flowers and especially wild animals.

While earlier views sought to elevate man into the angelic modes, the modern world accepts that we are closely related to nature, both plants and the animal world. Rather than lament this, Hughes recognises our links to the animal kingdom; the animal in ourselves, the potential for explosive violence, cruelty and barbarity but also celebrates the instinctive primal sensual energy of the natural animal in us all. He does this in an objective, detached and scientific manner avoiding shame, guilt or sentimentality.

As Ceridwen Dovey suggests, he “wanted to justify the animal in the human.”

Gerald Hughes, his elder brother by nine years, in his book, Ted and I, recounts an anecdote at school, where a teacher commenting on Ted’s description of “a wildflower’s gun breaking in the cold with frost chilled snap” - That’s poetry! Ted’s response, “Well if that’s poetry, that’s the way I think and I can give you no end of it”. Already there is evidence of the coiled violence Hughes perceives in nature.

As a modern poet, Hughes appreciates the fragility of life; its fragmented nature, its lack of certitude, its disconnected nature and our desperate need and quest for a sense of direction and purpose. Much of his poetry deals with the dark night of the soul.

His work also probes the psychic fields, clairvoyance and the supernatural. His poem Ouija deals with the toying of the supernatural both he and Sylvia engaged in.

Hughes’s first volume of verse, THE HAWK IN THE RAIN (1957), which included some of his best poems, such as The Thought-Fox and the title poems, The Hawk in the Rain and Hawk Roosting.

In 1956, Hughes met an American Fulbright scholar and poet, Sylvia Plath. It was mutual attraction at first sight. From then on their lives, careers and destinies became intricately enmeshed.

The argument about what happened that first night is typical of the controversies that have raged ever since. Whose truths should prevail? Hughes’s? Or Plath’s, albeit spoken in the voice of her dramatic interior? Or in his Poetry?

These questions are the crux of the Plath/Hughes enigma that has dogged literary biography for 50 years and they are resurfacing

The whole question of “the truth” in biography is almost a literary conundrum. It lies behind Hughes’s bitterness towards the biographers and hagiographers of Plath, and his overzealous protection of his and his children’s right to privacy. And it lies behind the viciousness with which the biographers, hagiographers and literary theorists have dealt, in turn, with Hughes’s perceived secrecy and reticence and, in some cases, obfuscation over the details of his life with Plath and the circumstances of her death.

When he was 40, (1970) Hughes finally collected and published an unfinished project, abandoned after the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. It became perhaps his most famous work, CROW.

Now he reached into the ferocious, a surreal collection of apocalyptic poems where violence lives alongside suffering, but where irony cuts and bevels the edges with a sharp, fierce humour.

Hughes had grown up close to nature, hunting animals with his older brother Gerald. He comes face to face with the animals, describing their physicality, often identifying with them through explosive dark, dangerous and aggressive predation. He is the Hawk Roosting.

In 1977 he was awarded an OBE and in 1984 he was appointed poet Laureate. Hughes became Britain’s first poet, revered even above Larkin, because of his bold confrontational certitude. Plath’s poetry is much more timid, questioning and filled with doubt.

His final work, a study of Sylvia Plath’s life, BIRTHDAY LETTERS, appeared in 1998 and became an immediate bestseller, reviving the controversies over her death by suicide in 1963. Written over a period of thirty years the letters addressed to an absent recipient attempting to come to grips with the story of his tumultuous marriage to Sylvia Plath and give his side of the story of their separation. Both were prone to violent emotions. He described it as “How strange that we have to make public declarations of our secrets”.

Birthday Letters, an epistolary mode, addressed to his deseased first wife, indicates a transformation from a detached, objective nature poet to a more personal voice. It continues an obsession with death.

Over the past twenty-five years, it has succeeded in redeeming his image from murderer to a more sympathetic, caring husband. Together with Plath’s personal writing, it acknowledges their close loving, supportive relationship over most of their seven years of marriage, interspersed with her occsional tempestuous outrages. They fed off each other. She assisted and promoted his work and he encouraged hers. He urged her to explore her emotional trauma and translate it into art, revealing her deepest anquish by the intensity of her work.

His Private Letters indicate his motives and the therapeutic effect of exposing himself:

‘I’m not sure the effect of writing the poems isn’t just too raw’.

at the end of the project

It was so great, I was sorry I hadn’t done it before. Writing released a bizarre dream life, and I realised how much had been locked up inside me.

“I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” Hughes wrote, in despair, to London’s Independent newspaper in 1989 after someone had chiseled his name off Plath’s gravestone.

Angela Bennie, reviewer of Letters Of Ted Hughes quotes:

“Sylvia killed herself on Monday morning,” begins his letter bluntly to one of his closest friends. It is shocking in its rational, descriptive flatness.

“I was the one who could have helped her, and the only one that couldn’t see that she really needed it this time. No doubt where the blame lies.”

Hughes was to be hounded for the rest of his life by the life and death of Plath and in this selection of letters she is the spectre that haunts them to the very end.

But it is not until the death in 1969 of Assiia Wevill and their daughter Shura - by gas in a copycat staging of Plath’s death (except that Plath had left their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, unharmed and safe in their beds upstairs) - that the first notes of a strange kind of bewilderment become detectable in his letters. Until then, he is stunned, but resilient. Now he is detached, but as one in shock.

“I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of ‘63 and ‘69,” he writes to another very close friend, Lucas Meyer, 20 years later.

< “I have an idea of those two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself …”

This question of who “owns” truth?

The enigma of the Hughes Plath relations dominated the public arena for years. Without doubt, that enigma would not exist without Plath’s suicide, no matter the quality or otherwise of her poetry, the nature of her marriage or the pathetic details of her life. Her death is the enigma’s life-blood, just as much as it has become her poetry’s.

Hughes’ laying-bare of private lives, in the form of these apparently personal verse-letters to Plath, presents a public statement exposing his interpretation of events.

According to Nadeem Azam:

Some detractors of Hughes, who had maintained a campaign against him because of his adulterous behaviour, softened their vilification of the poet after the publication in 1998 of “Birthday Letters” in which, for the first time, he poured out his heart to the world and delved into his relationship with Plath…….

Birthday Letters produced a caricature of feminism as always pitying Plath and blaming Hughes as a man with no heart to speak of. This, of course, enraged legions of people who felt sympathy for Plath.

The British literary critic Asad Yawar said the anthology “was an apologist diatribe concealed in honey” the feminist poet Robin Morgan told “Newsweek”: “My teeth began to grind uncontrollably.” She too had accused Ted of Sylvia’s murder.

There’s no question of Hughes finding ways to forgive himself for leaving Plath. By giving us his account of her psychic history inside his portrait of their domestic history, he creates a long perspective in which sudden actions become comprehensible – or at least inevitable.

“What happens in the heart simply happens.”

Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar” (Harper & Row) was first published under a pseudonym in England in 1963, one month before she committed suicide.

It is a revealing portrait of a deeply disturbed young lady. She has admitted to having had a happy childhood, but a traumatised adolescence. By the time she arrived in England in 1957, she has already make two serious attempts at suicide. After the premature death her father when she was eight, life seemed to lose its meaning for her.

More @:

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/Plath/the-bell-jar.html

The letters of Sylvia Plath give us a reliable and accurate picture of her true self. Her letters to her psychiatrist, reveal a troubled soul, briefly finding hope in her love of Hughes, but how lost she becomes without him. She cries out for some recognition and solace. During this period she experiences the exhilaration and exhaustion of intense writing, waking early, while the children sleep to express her most dark and deep inner anguish. Desperate for money, she sends them directly to her publishers, removing any doubt about their integrity.

Yet she feels all alone in a forlorn, pitiless universe.

Conflicting perspectives attempt to ascertain the truth by looking at issues from other sides. Ascertaining the truth is extremely difficult, but by objectively considering all the evidence we have some chance of understanding their predicaments.

In order to understand BIRTHDAY LETTERS, you need to know the details of their relationship and have some understanding of Sylvia Plath’s poetry especially “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Ariel” and “Whiteness I have Known”.

There is a wealth of material on the internet on the life of Ted Hughes.

Links to background on Ted Hughes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbAGbjXPCP8

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/thughes.htm
http://www.poemhunter.com/ted-hughes/biography/
Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer:Nadeem Azam: http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html