Page 391 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes though a conflict which had, until that point, led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly
cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence but also all that imaginative wealth and
vitality which had been half locked up within it.
The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which is
provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary
violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that of a human body in
anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed,
gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack’. But at the same time it is a play about a
man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep those tears
which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak and womanly. The
same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry. We have only to recall Lady Macbeth’s
renunciation of her own ‘soft’ maternal impulses in order to appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s
own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of its terms:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I. vii)
The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of course,
in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and Shakespeare. It is
present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might reasonably be regarded as
a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some of the most fundamental
characteristics of the human identity.
Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to take
account both of what Mark Spilka has called ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’ and of Ian Suttie’s
discussion of the extent and rigour of the ‘taboo on tenderness’ in our own culture. But such an
investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger cultural context, and perhaps
above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love has itself traditionally been
expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
1. Who of the following did Ted Hughes influence?
(a) Processing (programming language) (b) Sylvia Plath
(c) Dewi Zephaniah Phillips (d) William Butler Yeats
2. Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at ...... .
(a) Trinity College, Cambridge (b) Peterhouse, Cambridge
(c) Queens’ College, Cambridge (d) Pembroke College, Cambridge
3. Which of the following titles did Ted Hughes have?
(a) Brain-Dead Poets Society (b) Poet Laureate of Freemasonry
(c) British Poet Laureate (d) The Distrest Poet

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