Page 392 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

4. What proceeded Ted Hughes? Notes
(a) Andrew Motion (b) Ted Hughes
(c) England (d) World War I
5. When did Ted Hughes die?
(a) 1998-08-23 (b) 1998-11-23
(c) 1998-10-28 (d) 1998-08-16
The investigation which I describe is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My more modest aim
here has been to draw attention to the role which is played by this conflict in two of the most
hauntingly powerful of Ted Hughes’s early poems and to suggest that Hughes’s poetic powers are
fully realised not when this conflict is resolved but when it is unleashed in its most violent form.
In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes’s poetry
has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality
one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and
embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern
history. He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May
morning’, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of
the river’s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods
violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental
disintegration under the super-ego of Moses and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’,
and leaving him in secure possession of that ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes
in his poetry.
The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality is to see Hughes’s poetry as
essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical
rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours,
fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan
soul.
In reality perhaps neither of these views is wholly appropriate, and the truth comes somewhere
between the two. But what does seem clear is that when Hughes talks of modern civilisation as
consisting in ‘mental disintegration under the super-ego of Moses and the self-anaesthetising
schizophrenia of St Paul’ he is once again engaging in that characteristic strategy of externalising a
conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. For it must be suggested that Paul’s own
‘schizophrenia’ consisted in an acute conflict between the impulse towards tenderness, abundance
and generosity and the impulse towards puritanical violence–the violence of chastity. It is precisely
this conflict which seems to be buried in Hughes’s early poetry and which, as I have suggested,
eventually erupts in the poetry of Crow. If, in Crow, Hughes is able to explore and express the
internalised violence of the rationalist sensibility with more imaginative power than any other
modern poet, it is perhaps because he does so from within a poetic sensibility which is itself
profoundly intellectual, and deeply marked by that very puritanical rationalism which he so
frequently–and I believe justifiably–attacks.

31.2 Ted Hughes: Thrushes; Ted Hughes as an Animal Poet

31.2.1 Thrushes: Text of the Poem

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living-a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce,
a stab

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