Page 63 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, OBE, vote for the best writing in English in the New Poetry
Poll, Whitbread Book of the Year, W.H. Smith Literature award, Forward Prize for Poetry,
Queen’s Order of Merit, T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, South Bank Award for Literature, Whitbread
Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Book of the Year again. In 1984, he was appointed
England’s poet laureate.
Hughes is what some have called a nature poet. A keen countryman and hunter from a young
age, he viewed writing poems as a continuation of his earlier passion. ‘This is hunting and the
poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.’ (Poetry in
the Making , 1967)

5.2 Hughes and Plath

A strong indirect source of interest in the person of Hughes (aside from his poetry) is his
seven-year marriage to the well-known American Poet, Sylvia Plath. Birthday Letters is a
sequence of lyrics written by Hughes in the first year of their marriage, cast as a continued
conversation with Plath.
When Plath committed suicide in 1963 (they had separated in 1962), many held Hughes responsible
for her death as a consequence of his adulterous relationship with Assia Wevill; recent biographies
such as Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet have attempted to ‘set the record
straight and clear the air of rancor and recrimination’ (Brooke Allen, The New York Times ).
Though deeply marked by the loss, Hughes was publicly silent on the subject for more than
30 years out of his sense of responsibility to protect the couple’s two young children, whose
perceptions of their mother would have otherwise been impossibly spoiled by external interference.
The publication of Birthday Letters has been seen as a ‘retaking’ of the histories that had been
stolen from the family through the cracks in the armour.

Did u know? ‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you.
This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish
between those things about which you are merely curious–things you heard
about last week or read about yesterday- and things which are a deep part
of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated
from?

5.3 The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

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