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Honoring Ted Hughes
There’s a move underway to honor the great Ted Hughes in Poet’s Corner, and I for one can only applaud the idea. He was certainly, as Simon Armitage writes, “a genius with an unparalleled gift, a once-in-a-generation poet whose work was a major contribution to English literature.” Leading the effort, apparently, is the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and his effort strikes me as an act of great friendship and humility. Heaney is a fine poet, but his work doesn’t match Hughes’s in power, range, and sheer adventurousness.Read More
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Nicholas Hughes, Individual
We finally have a fairly lengthy portrait of Nicholas Hughes from his good friend, Joe Saxton. It’s a welcome resurrection of Nick Hughes the man from the mausoleum of his role, so fanatically designed by the literary Death Eaters, as the Tragic Victim of his parents’ marriage, his mother’s depression, his father’s infidelity, his genetic heritage, or some combination of all or some of these elements. The Tragic Victim makes a perfect figure for the Death Eaters’ favorite narrative; but Hughes’s real life story is more significant than these cannibal fantasies.Read More
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Adios, Nicholas Hughes … Hello, Death Eaters
I’ve felt mysteriously shaken by the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In part it’s because I remember with such affection the tenderness in Ted Hughes’s letters to and about Nicholas, whose deep knowledge of the natural world Hughes loved and admired. But part of my feeling involves the dread of Death Eaters; not those demonic Harry Potter wizards and witches, but their literati equivalents: critics, biographers, opinion page hacks and the like.Read More
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The Guardian’s Great Poets Series
Britain’s The Guardian offers up a series it calls “Great Poets of the 20th Century,” a link-rich glimpse into the English public intellectual class’s image of itself. American readers may be surprised that the editors claim America’s own Sylvia Plath for England (anticipating, I suppose, the outcry that would have greeted their inclusion of Ted Hughes without her) and mysteriously elevate Sassoon over Owen. Still, it seems well worth reading.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes V
Finishing The Letters of Ted Hughes—which I managed to do while recovering from a nasty bout with the flu—left me with a strange mixture of exaltation and biting sadness: something, I mean, beyond the sadness that books like this (biographies, letters, etc.) inevitably inspire because they end in the grave.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes IV
The following passage is from a letter written by Ted Hughes to Bishop Ross Hook, 10 November 1982: “Poets would like to feel their talent is some sort of bonus—like physical strength, or swiftness, or even an aptitude for mathematics. I submit that it is very likely something quite different. I think we get a closer description of the way it has always operated if we regard it as nothing more than a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction—whether our own or that of others whose feeling we can share.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes III
Herewith a few more illuminating insights from The Letters of Ted Hughes…. Hughes to Anne Sexton, 9 August 1967: “Don’t you worry about reviews. I’ve just been getting a load of them too. Both kinds are bad, but the favourable are worst I think. They tend to confirm one in one’s own conceit—unless they praise what you yourself don’t like. Also, they make you self-conscious about your virtues—just as when you praise a child for some natural charm. Also, they create an underground opposition: applause is the beginning of abuse.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes II
These piquant passages are from a letter written by Ted Hughes to his sister Olwyn, dated August 22, 1957. Hughes and Plath had moved to Eastham, Massachusetts, where the couple lived before she took up a teaching job at Smith College, her alma mater, in nearby Northampton. His outsider’s insight into the condition of ’50s America reminds me of Tocqueville, though Tocqueville’s fascination yields, in Hughes, to a visceral alarm: What a place America is. Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made.Read More
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On The Letters of Ted Hughes
I’ve been reading The Letters of Ted Hughes, which I’m finding impossible to put down. Like all letters written by people of genius, Hughes’s letters are a magical mix of erudition, crank notions, unguarded humor, soap opera, and authentic emotion. Hughes—who for my money stands as the greatest British poet of the last century—has more valuable things to say about the practice of poetry than anyone I’ve read. Herewith an example: “Up to the invention of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after, all reading was done aloud. Most people were incapable of reading silently.Read More
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Dangerous Considerations
The October 2007 issue of Poetry carries an observant, insightful bit of prose by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entitled a “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook.” He touches on Christmas in Krakow, Gottfried Benn, political disputes occasioned by Zbigniew Herbert’s death, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann (whose Magic Mountain Musil described as a “shark’s stomach”), Ted Hughes’s translations of Yehuda Amichai, a festschrift honoring the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, the essays of Gershom Scholem, Saint-John Perse (nom de plume of Aléxis Léger, who in the 1930s served as director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), E. M.Read More