American Poetry Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Poetry Review.
http://www.jstor.org
Ted Hughes Author(s): DAVID PORTER Source: The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (September/October 1975), pp. 13-18Published by: American Poetry ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27775040Accessed: 02-01-2016 07:18 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Departure At Dusk:
The Airport Corridors, The Late Autumn Plane Goodbye friends in your hiding places wearing your coats of skins and looking to the sky. Autumn has disappeared to the south and you are settled into hawthorn thickets growing smaller
holding hands with your sexy girlfriend the night.
Over the ridge, over your eyes caged in branches
enormous black flights of birds are coming in low
crossing the stream just north of you where the dead sheep fade into the soil ?
fade away to bones and thick white coats
and sink into the layers of earth beneath them
where the slow hearts of moles beat
in controlled death down the long corridors of sleep.
Ha! Already I can hear you walking away in my memory like the echos of a lost watch.
The delicate trail fades and disappears like a vapor path across the night sky.
You migrate, you hibernate or you die ?
how can I love you so much when you can't even
understand nature's simplest laws?
No ? Don't you dare wave to me! Goodbye
you ridiculous fast-breathing padded bones
I can no longer bear saying goodbye to.
David Porter pho to by Ma
In the poetry of Ted Hughes we are witnessing the death of a familiar but now increasingly irrelevant aesthetic. Simulta
neously we see emerging in the work of this English poet a new idea of poetry involving an enor
mous acceleration of intake ?
myth, epic, folk cycle, comics, ad
vertising, TV, the other pop disposables
? and aggressively reconciled to the consciousness of a post-literate culture. His ob jective is poetry that is equipped for life.
The old aesthetic, dominated
by the Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, seems in this new
light to have been static, an
elegant urn, or simply diffuse and
self-consciously erudite ("the rose in the steel dust"; "medallions / to forge Achaia"). Theirs was a
passive, vulnerable aesthetic, its
fragility the subject of much of their poetry. Robert Lowell ex tends their assumptions in his
laboriously balanced meditations.
Forty years ago Hart Crane distilled the presiding idea in a gloss on the poem "Chaplin esque": "Poetry, the human
feelings, ' the kitten,' is so
crowded out of the humdrum, mechanized scramble of today that the man who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or him self from annihilation.''
The new poetics of Ted Hughes conceives poems as hard and
September/October 1975
predatory, like killer sharks. The sea pulls everything to pieces, he has written, "except its killers, alert and shapely." Thus poems instinctively must be about the business, Hughes says, of
managing the practical dif ficulties of survival. This radical
conception means two basic
things: poems inhabit the same world as assassinations and must not allow themselves to be made trivial by comparison; poems
make the essential thing happen, they rescue us from inanition. This is their totemic value as the main regenerative acts of the human psyche.
Hughes's mode is no sweet new
style, but rather wily, elemen
tary, and attacking like an animal. It is not the twitches and rustles of "confessional" poets out of university writing classes. Least of all is it like that of his generation of writers in England, whose poems someone has called mournful mouthings over pints of
beer, soiled sheets, and garden implements. Hughes's style is
conglomerate, ravenous, drawing in everything from Old English to shamanism to pop. His imagined poet is a scavenger over all the mishmash of the globed junkyard, hardly the archetypal figure James Joyce saw as the God of
creation, indifferent, paring his
fingernails. The crucial objective in our
wasting culture, according to
Hughes, is immediate: to keep all the sensibilities intact. How, af ter all, could the studied moder nist styles of Eliot and Auden and their followers perceive today the simultaneous meaning of Disney
World, tiger cages, and thalidomide except pretentiously from a great distance and
through the spectacles of books? "When he lay in a doorway and
watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him,,, so Hughes has written of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, "he realized that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die.''
In Ted Hughes's work, ac
cordingly, are early signs of a
deep geological shift under way in
English language poetry. The slide is away from poetry that is
predominantly isolated, in
dividual, inward-turning, and
self-indulgently hallucinatory toward works which, in Hughes's words, are in tune with the rhyth ms of the people in a direct and
dynamic way, that is, toward
poetry that is folk-oriented, radically political. The resulting separation is Hughes's poetics from the old familiar tonalities ex
plains why he is thought to have barbarized the vocation of poet and to have forsaken his humanistic obligations. Ian Hamilton, the English poet and critic, says stiffly that Hughes simply is mistaken.
Yet no poet writing today is more deeply endowed by the
English literary inheritance than
Hughes. To say what others have not yet ventured these days about a new language, a new poet, and a new poetry in deep reconcilement with the consciousness of our age, he involves us not only in his own
poetry and in the microcosm of
England today, but also in
English dialect and in the projec ts of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Keith Douglas, of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, of Yeats and Jung. In addition, he makes an aesthetics out of the lives of beasts.
I. The Present Age The dominant fact of our age,
according to Hughes, is that Western men have lost contact with the raw dream of their
origins. They are partial men, in
capable of mastering the brute
beauty of their lives. Thus
Hughes conceives an exemplary counter-thrusting poetry which, hawk-like, attains the powerfully balanced exertion Hopkins called
mastery. Animals and other creatures are equipped by sinew and instinct for such life. When this happens in poetry it is a mat ter of language. Though in
consistently attained, that is
Hughes 's considerable goal: a
poetic language resourceful
enough to assert itself amid the
Page 13
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
crushing banality and terror which are the terms of our times.
His own language at times
achieves, as he says of
Shakespeare's, the aspect of
being invented in a state of crisis, for a terribly urgent job. Poems from the cycle Crow (1970), for
example, range from lyric to
devotion to street curse, com
pacted as in the poem "A
Horrible Religious Error": When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel
brown, From the hatched atom
With its alibi self twisted around it
Lifting a long neck
And balancing that deaf and mineral
stare
The sphyjix of the final fact
And flexing on that double flameflicker
tongue A syllable like the rustling of the
spheres
God's grimace writhed, a leaf in the
furnace
And man's and woman's knees melted,
they collapsed Their neck-muscles melted, their brows
bumped the ground Their tears evacuated visibly
They whispered ''Your will is our
peace, "
But Crow only peered. Then took a step or two
forward, Grabbed this creature by the slackskin
nape,
Beat the hell out of it, and ate it.
(Crow, 34)
Magnificent images seem
casually expended: "dull gunshot and its after-rale/Among conifers, in rainy twilight." Ex
cruciating junctures of sen
sibility: "Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth." Sud den profundities open out: "crow, a black rainbow/Bent in emp tiness/over emptiness/But flying" ; "stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of the
nothing forest, clouding their
spores, the virus of God." Cartoons cut through dogma in
a poem about how truth kills
everybody: The ankle of a rising, fiery angel
? he
held it Christ's hot pounding heart ? he held
it
The earth shrunk to the size of a hand
grenade And he held it he held it and held it and BANG! He was blasted to nothing. ^
(Crow, 71)
Hughes offers a radical liberation ? in substance,
viewpoint, and voice ? from the
subjective plaints of the con
fessional poets and their tin-pan counterparts. Hughes perceives a
tougher instrument adequate to
the corrosive realities of our age.
Consequently, like Brecht a
generation earlier, he transmits an audacity that is breath
stopping in an age otherwise blan ched to indifference by im
poverishment and brutality. The chronicle of this stub
bornly honest engagement is scattered in his drama, fiction, and criticism in various
periodicals. The major poetry of it is in five important books: The
Hawk in the Rain (1957), Luper
cal (I960), Wodwo (1967), Crow 11970), and Selected Poems 1957 1967(19721
II. The East European Poets
When Hughes reads his poetry in public he leans slightly, as if in to a chronic Yorkshire wind or, better, as if away from the sensed
overhang of a cliff. He once described the rock face that loomed over his Yorkshire
birthplace this way: "Something about the clouds and light, the in clination of the season, or some
overnight strengthening of the
earth, has reared it right over
you, and you feel to be in the mouth of a vast dripping cave, in some hopeless age/' He bends to his reading, head tilted, as if the
light were a slight glare or as if he were in that Yorkshire valley where there shone as he says, "a
slightly disastrous, crumbly, grey light, sunless and yet too clear, like a still from the documentary film of an accident."
The Yorkshire cliff of Hughes's childhood looms for him as the emblem of our present age. It seemed to him raised against a
passage to the south and sym bolic of the life: "while thinking distractedly out to east and west, we valley-dwellers were stuck
looking into the dark hair wall of Scout Rock, as it was called, and the final sensation was of having been trapped." The link is direct from that supposed Yorkshire en
trapment to Hughes 's intuitive
understanding of the political en
trapments enforced since 1945, particularly in East Europe, of the sort Solzhenitsyn has since disclosed in The Gulag Ar
chipelago. With the poets of East
Europe ?
Popa, Holub, Herbert, Milosz, among others ?
Hughes has located explicit terms of the
deprived human situation in our
age: "They have had to live out, in actuality, a vision which for ar
tists elsewhere is a prevailing shape of things but only brokenly glimpsed, through the clutter of our civilized liberal confusion.
They must be reckoned among the purest and most wide awake of living poets."
Long before it was fashionable,
Hughes saw the inescapable prospect: "The Soviet vision of the future," he wrote in the 60's, "does not differ fundamentally from the American one ? both are barren and are now in
creasingly seen to be so." To Hughes, authoritarian sup
pressions have their bloodless
parallels in the withering inanities of Western society. Like
D. H. Lawrence, he loathes civilized abstracting at the price of blooded nature. He decries "the oppressive deadness of
civilization, the spiritless , materialism of it, the stupidity of it." Movies and TV give us con stant but unacknowledged read outs of our morally vacant
familiarity with the monstrous:
shooting somebody through the midriff Was too like striking a match
Too like potting a snooker ball
fCrow, 15)
Hughes's condemnation of civilized stupor brushed even
Sophocles, whose moral
equations and formal finish seem to him not to reveal but to hide the bloody root of Oedipus' suf
fering. It is, he believes, by groping in those pits opened beneath the rhetoric that we
grasp our basic fable and con
sequently devise our salvation. But words from the old lexicon
no longer draw blood. They are no match for Crow in Hughes's surrealization:
Words attacked him with the glottal bomb ?
He wasn'? listening. Words surrounded and over-ran him
with light aspirates ?
He was dozing. Words infiltrated guerilla labials ?
Crow clapped his beak, scratched it.
Words swamped him with consonantal masses ?
Crow took a sip of water and thanked
heaven.
(Crow, 22)
East European poets are exam
ples for us particularly in their rhetorical honesty and incredibly fine monitoring of faint signals. Their helplessness in the cir
cumstances, Hughes says, "has
purged them of rhetoric. They cannot falsify their experience by any hopeful effort to change it. Their poetry is a strategy of
making audible meanings without disturbing the silence, an art of homing in tentatively on
vital scarcely perceptible signals, making no mistakes but with no
hope of finality, continuing to ex
plore. Finally, with delicate
maneuverings, they precipitate out of the world of malicious
negatives a happy positive." The
deadly serious caricature of that commitment is Hughes's folk hero Crow, who is the poet of our
age. After an ordinary murder in the adjoining parking lot, when for someone the trees closed forever:
And the streets closed forever
And the body lay on the gravel
Of the abandoned world
Among abandoned utilities
Exposed to infinity forever
Crow had to start searching for
something to eat.
(Crow, 10)
Survival breeds beauty, ad
versity has its revelations. In
Hughes's world one wants to go on existing. The scramble to sur vive is a kind of street fighting but it yields human definition: "It is the only precious thing, and
designed in accord with the whole Universe. Designed, indeed, by the whole Universe. They (the East European poets) are not the
spoiled brats of civilization disap pointed of impossible and unreal
expectations and deprived of the revelations of necessity ... They have managed to grow up to a view of the unaccommodated
Universe, but it has not made them cynical, they still like it and
keep all their sympathies intact.
They have got back to the simple animal courage of accepting the odds and have rediscovered the frontier."
He has little patience with con
temporaries who retreat into
fashions. He calls his fellow poets to a more difficult role for which the East Europeans are his
paradigms. "They refuse to seil out ... in order to escape with some fragmentary sense, some
abstract badge of self
estrangement, into a popular membership safety." Every man, whether he likes it or not, says
Hughes, is a micro-model of his
nation but it is the poet who must find the streets where the
shooting is going on. "One
imagines," he has said, "that it is
only those poets whose make-up somehow coincides with the vital
impulse of their times who are
able to come to real stature ?
when poets apparently more
naturally gifted simply wither away."
Ill* Poetry Must Seek Blood Roots
Poetry equipped for life means not moralizing poetry but rather
poetry equal by the breadth of its own special knowledge (call it
cunning) and integrity to what A. Alvarez has called the destructive realities we inhabit. It means a
poetry fully instructed in ex
perience from Olympic murders in Munich to Miss America TV
pageants. It is a poetry wary of snares, able to sniff despair, and
wise to the sell-out. Hughes describes the Yugoslav poet Vasko Popa's poetry as spare, stripped of false ideas and safe
JOHN
KFATQ'Q
PORRIDGE Victoria WScCabe, editor
What are the favorite recipes of Marge Piercy, Charles
Wright, James Dickey, Caro
lyn Kizer, and Donald Justice?
John Keats's Porridge presents the favorite recipes of 115 con
temporary American poets in
cluding Hardcase Survival Pinto Bean Sludge and Gaides Piiafi. This collection is a celebration of the .happy activity of cooking and an expression of the kinship between the creation of a good meal and the making of a poem. The recipes for soups, salads, entrees, and desserts were aS! tested by the poets and the edi tor. Over half of these were chosen because they keep the
poet full for a long time at little cost.
"This good anthology of recipes is as satisfying to this reader as a good anthology of poems, for after all, all recipes are poems to the hungry man."?William Cole
September. 120 pages. 51/4 x 8,
Paper, $2.95.
University of Iowa Press Order Department 17 West College Street PoOjj Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Page 14 The American Poetry Review
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
dispositions. "No poetry is more difficult to outflank, yet it is in no sense defensive. His poems are
trying to find out what does exist, and what the conditions really are. He never loses his deeply ingrained humour and irony: that is his way of hanging on to his human wholeness,"
Wholeness demands poetry alert to all the encounters beneath the shell of rational performance. "To live removed from this inner universe of experience," Hughes says in his poetry primer for young people, "is also to live removed from ourself, banished from ourself and real life. The
struggle truly to possess his own
experience, in other words to
regain his genuine self, has been man's principal occupation, wherever he could find leisure for it, since he first grew this enor
mous surplus of brain." If the
England ruled by sacrament and ceremony interested Eliot, it is
primordial England when
sturgeons cut the Thames and wolves crossed the moors that
Hughes summons. These are far starker realities than Wallace Stevens cast for when he said:
"Nothing illustrates the im
portance of poetry better than the
possibility that within it there may yet be found a reality adequate to the profound necessities of life today or for that matter any day."
Hughes would have poems send their words to feel the pressure that levels mountains and. to clutch the life that escapes out of dead pigs and skinned weasels and haunts the grey tones of photographs of soldiers long since buried.
What humbles these hills has raised The arrogance of blood and bone, And thrown ike hawk upon the wind, And lit the fox in the dripping ground.
(Lupercal, 14)
Whatever falsifies instinct, as does rhetoric, blocks visitations from the elemental world. The deepest loss is the loss of our
beginnings, Hughes's poems deploy words around those lost origins.
Now the mind's wandering elementals,
Ousted from the traveller-told
Unapproachable islands, From their heavens and their burning
underworld, Wait dully at the traffic crossing, Or lean over headlines, taking nothing
in.
(Lupercal, 20)
Reviewers, minds congealed by decorous banalities, react with cries of "paranoia!" to glimpses in his poems of that murderous churning world under us all. Yet
whole populations sit slumped in front of TV sets, feeding their hid den dreams of Gomorrah. In this rapt paralysis, Hughes says, "We are dreaming a perpetual
massacre. And when that leaks up into what ought to be morally responsible art ... then the critics pounce, and convert it to evidence in a sociological study." But the stink will not down. Though you skin the poet, his sucking truth will weasel up somewhere else:
They nailed to a door
The stoat with the sun in its belly, But its red unmanageable life Has licked the stylist out of their skulls, Has sucked that age like an egg and
gone off
Along ditches where flies and leaves
Overpower our tongues, got into some
grave ?
Not a dog to follow it down ?
Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in Brix ton.
fLupercal? 16)
The blood-roots of our lives where the myth-stoat makes his passage can sustain us in our state of civilized depletion, and no amount of civilized litter will choke out their vitality.
To Hughes's mind, Dylan Thomas had set out to reach that
deep realm of sustenance beneath the polite surfaces. "He made a half-conscious attempt to take on all the underground life that the upper-crustish, militant, colonial
suppressive cast of the English intelligence excludes.''
Hughes has sought to recover this lost life which death sub tracts. It is the vital force that haunts the photographs that turn up repeatedly in the poems. His poem of the dead pig stalks the absent life-force that had heaved beneath the factual hide:
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes. Its trotters stuck straight out.
Such weight and thick pink bulk Set in death seemed not just dead. It was less than lifeless, further off. A remembrance of a greased
pig chase at a fair begins to restore to the carcass the lost fur nace of life:
Its squeal was the rending of metal.
Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse V? ?
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.
fLupercal, 41)
The same gorge of life, what is now cleaned up, mentalized, ab stracted, and labeled "Diony sus," is what's missing behind the present English exterior, killed finally, Hughes believes, by the Puritan slaughter of the in stincts in the Seventeenth Cen tury.
THE NEW MOON A Magazine of Poetry
Editors: Michael LeFabre and David Whitehall; David M. Marovich, Associate Editor SPRING 1975 features E. G. Burrows, Thomas Brush, Danny Rendleman; also jack Anderson, R. P. Dickey, Wild, Goldbarth, Glaser, Fox, Scott, Hewitt, Etter, McKeown,
Pfingston, Stap, others.
AUTUMN 1975 features Mark McCloskey, Robert Vander Molen, Albert Goldbarth; also Don Stap, M. R. Doty, Bond, Cooley, Novak, Le Mon, LeFabre, many others.
Published twice yearly $2.00 a copy; Bulk and trade rates. Your manuscripts?poems, short prose, translations and moon poems?are welcome.
2147 Oakland Drive; Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008
He felt the restorative myths through his Yorkshire surroun
dings, particularly as the dialect transmitted energies of the primitive deities, as he calls them, out of "an instinct and ancestral memory/' Renewal of the language will come as it penetrates again to those origins. "One has only to look at our
vocabulary/' says Hughes, "to see where our real mental life has its roots, where the paths to and from our genuine imaginations run, clearly enough/' The Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Celtic gods are not obsolete: "they are the better part of our patrimony still locked up." Poetry alert to the old dialect root-sounds can open paths back and down to our
beginnings, to primal sources of brute being uncrippled by men
talizing.
The passage to that dark renewing realm must go in
directly and by imagination through the wilds of the mythic tales ? or through poetry. The
much acclaimed poem "Pike" is Hughes's quintessential enact ment of that adventure. After the coolly terrifying description of the pike's "submarine delicacy and horror," the poem concludes:
A pond I fished, fifty yards across, Whose lilies and muscular tench Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted, them ?
Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense
and old
Thai past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished With the hair frozen on my head For what might move, for what eye
might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods Frail on my ear against the dream Darkness beneath night's darkness had
freed, Thai rose slowly towards me, watching,
^Lupercai, 57)
The poet in our day must, as here in Hughes's poem, call up the counterforce to civilized debilitation and savageness. His job takes a tough wiliness. The survivor poet, withstanding the
ordinary and inevitable destruc
tions and, like Crow, himself a kind of poet with a necessary courage and a crafty catechism, will also pass his test at the womb-door:
Who is stronger than hope? Death. Who is stronger than the will?
Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than death?
Me, evidently. Pass, Crow.
(Crow, 3)
IV. Poetry of Balance A deeply positioned balance is
the primary structure and source of integrity in Hughes's poetic consciousness. "Poetry is
nothing/' he says, "if not ... the record of just how the forces of the Universe try to redress some balance disturbed by human error.
"
Equilibrium is imaged forth in
cessantly in his poetry. The water
lily ? like a man's head, like a
poem ? holds its face upward to
light while the under part roots
deep in the bottom slime where: Prehistoric bedragonned times Crawl that darkness with Latin
names.
(Lupercal, 29}
The balance holds in dop pelganger themes in Hughes's tales, where protagonists are divided between human and bestial or mythological shape. The poems work less
schematically, seeking the vast
novelty of the dark world under the world, and taking momentary grips on its mystery, as the otter (to use an image of Hughes's) takes a stolen hold on the bitch otter in the field. The second book of poetry, Lupercal, like its name, is a summoning of the bestial for ces to vivify life, to make the women fertile, and to have the demons out of their holes again. Poems stalk that experience:
These feet, deprived,
Disdaining all that are caged, or
storied,or pictured,
Through and throughout the true
world search
For their vanished head, for the world
Vanished with the head, the
teeth, the quick eyes ?.
(Lupercal, 13}
Hughes's obsession with sheer force is inseparable from his courting of conditions of equipoise. "Repeatedly in the poems the imagination hauls up wards, following the hawk, to reach 44the master-fulcrum of violence" as Hughes calls the point of balance in 'The Hawk in the Rain." That is the in tersection of intense forces ?
whether in a life or in a poem ?
the point between what raises up and what destroys. Each poem is a position along the bar on that fulcrum, separate occasions
marking the force of intense op position. As in the hawk poem, that high risk leads to the laboriously, violently even, at tained place of equal coun terforces. At the point of that balance, in unfamiliar space, rests the life principle, "the diamond
September/October 1975 Page 15
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
point of will."
Always, from that soaring feat, a fall is imagined or ex
perienced. For that is the failed
task, the fooFs overreach, or the error in the universal structure that must then again be redressed. The poise unbalances, the weather turns, the soaring hawk
suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round
angelic eye
Smashed, mix the heart's blood
with the mire of the land.
/Hawk, 11)
The core figure of balance structures Hughes's ex
traordinary essay on the central fable in Shakespeare, whose
poetry he sees as a microcosm of the momentous counterforces
warring within Queen Elizabeth and in her times between satanic necessities and heavenly aspirations. The balance rests in sexual terms, and finally, as
Hughes reads Shakespeare, the central fable engages the mystery of integrating man's psychic wholeness. A similar balance bet ween the rational and dark sides constitutes Hughes's own central uroboric fable.
Vo Shamanism The primary analogue of
Hughes's enterprise is shamanism. It is a basic allegory, the dream of two worlds. "What am I?" Hughes begins the poem "Wodwo," its title an Old
English word he translates as "a sort of half-man half-animal
spirit," Defining a man's whole
nature, the enigma Hughes describes as the powerhouse at the center of Shakespeare's mind, is his also. It is the sphinx's rid
dle, and inspection of the vast lower realms is thus thrust upon the poet, as upon the shaman.
Hughes's selections from
Shakespeare, (1971), extracted from their contexts, reveal that central fable: the confrontation between Venus and Adonis, that
is, between the hidden and the rational. In that selection, Hughes says, "We see quite new
things a new teeming of
possibilities, as we look through them into our own darkness." The dark revelation re-enacts the shamanistic flight to the demon
world, the monomythic entry and return on the heroic quest. "You see very well," Hughes told an in
terviewer, "where Nietzsche got his Dionysus. It was a genuine vision of something on its way back to the surface. The rough beast in Yeats's poem." All that
energy and violence in Hughes's first book of poetry seem now in this light to have been an in stinctive ambush for the demons of life.
The shamanic experience lurks in all the images of the hunter, the
caged animals, and the other creature-confrontations. His animals locate our beginnings, the irreducible being, and the stubbornness of life. The hawk,
the fox, the otter, the pike, and the crow, are part of what we are when the hamburger bars, snowmobiles, plastic wrap, and
coming-out parties are sub tracted. It is anything but a fad dish primitivism on Hughes 's
part. Rather, shamanism
provides him with a model for the
original poetic act. It also ex
plains the kinship between his
poetry, folk-epic, plays and his children's verse and stories.
Hughes wrote in 1964: "The initiation dreams, the general schema of the shamanic flight, and the figures and adventures
they encounter, are not a shaman
monopoly: they are, in fact, the basic experience of the poetic temperament we call 'romantic'." In a shamanizing society, he con
tinued, "
'Venus and Adonis,' some of Keats's longer poems, 'The Wanderings of Oisin,' 'Ash
Wednesday,' would all qualify their authors for the magic drum (of the shaman); while the actual
flight lies perceptibly behind many of the best fairy tales, and behind myths such as those of Or
pheus and Herakles, and behind the epics of Gilgamesh and
Odysseus. It is the outline, in
fact, of the Heroic Quest. The shamans seem to undergo, at will and at phenomenal intensity, and with practical results, one of the main regenerating dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental
poetic event." We note particularly the idea
of practicality. For Hughes is not a mystic, but rather a man
making the most practical sort of claims for poetry. "Shamanism," he said, "is not a religion, but a
technique for moving in a state of
ecstasy among the various
spiritual realms, and for generally dealing with souls and spirits, in a
practical way, in some practical crisis." This is a shamanism of useful transport, treating real delusions.
Hughes had his own practical crisis early, according to W. S.
Merwin, whose account of it puts flesh on this mystical passage.
Merwin, in 1959 or 1960, had sent his poem "Lemuel's Blessing" to
Hughes to read. Eight years later, Merwin wrote: When I'd finished the poem ... I
showed it to Ted Hughes. It was the
last winter that he and Sylvia were
living around the corner from us in
London. He told me a story. At Cam
bridge he set out to study English literature. Hated it. Groaned having to
write those essays. Felt he was dying of it in some essential place. Sweated
late at night over the paper on Dr.
Johnson et al ? things he didn't want
to read. One night, very late, very
tired, he went to sleep. Saw the door
open and someone like himself come in
with a fox's head. The visitor went over
to his desk, where an unfinished essay was lying, and put his paw on the
papers, leaving a bloody mark; then he
came over to the bed, looked down at
Ted and said, "You're killing us," and
went out the door.
Hughes switched to an
thropology at Cambridge! The ac count records an early working out of Hughes's compulsion, no doubt with suggestive con nections to Jung's experience.
Hughes has written on
Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Keith Douglas, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath, locating in each the deep-diving, conjuring, soul-restoring shamanic power. He finds them all gropers in the pit. He sees
parallels between the psychotic state and the shaman's plunge, both being breaches in the hum drum which lead to openings of
terrifying disclosure. The poet's craft is to make words enact those disclosures. Of Sylvia Plath, he has said, she "had free and con trolled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic
priests, shamans and Holy men, and more recently flung open to tourists with the passport of such
hallucinogens as LSD." Dylan Thomas's death of alcohol
poisoning in New York, Hughes interprets as a final shamanist
summoning by Thomas of the central life out of his own brain stem. "What he was really waiting for, and coaxing with
alcohol," wrote Hughes, "was the delicate cerebral disaster that demolishes the old self for good, with all its crushing for tifications, and leaves the atman a clear field."
Shakespeare stands in
Hughes's mind pre-eminently as the poet enacting the shamanic excursion. Of Shakespeare's cen tral obsession with the body-mind antagonism in "Venus and Adonis," Hughes says, "it is a
perfect example of the ancient shamanisic dream of the call to the poetic or holy life ... It em bodies the biological polarity of the life of the body and archaic nervous system and the life of the reflexive cortex. In more concrete
form, the fable contains hints of atavistic memories from earlier times, resurfaeings of rituals and
symbols of which Shakespeare cannot have heard or read.''
VI. The Poet-Shaman The procedures of that
discovery in poetry today demand a broad-sensing creature-poet, able to traverse what Hughes has called the realm between our or
dinary minds and our deepest life. The data field, consisting of the
signal-laden air and the image cluttered landscape of experience, surrounds the poet. Reality everywhere gives its lessons:
Its mishmash of scripture and
physics, With here, brains in hands, for exam
ple, And there, legs in a tree top.
(Crow, 14)
The field of data includes Belfast and King Kong and John Milton. Everywhere the collec tion is purposeful; no experience is outside the poet's territory. In
deed, Hughes conceives himself as a sort of cosmic signalman taking up his post in the beach bunker after the armistice papers have been signed. He said of
World War II soldiers: "All they wanted was to get back into civ vies and get home to the wife and kids for the rest of their lives ...
They'd had enough sleeping out.
Now I came a bit later. I hadn't had enough. I was all for opening negotiations with whatever hap pened to be out there." Thus
Hughes's encounters are with creatures quite unlike London clerks:
At nightfall as the sea darkens, A depth darkness thickens, mustering
from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea's edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering,
mangling their pallor.
Gradually the laboring of the tide Falls back from its productions, Its power slips back from glistening
nacelles, and
they are crabs. Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring
inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
(Wodwo,21)
Creature and human merge in
Hughes's vision, as do creature and poem. The obsession attends his remarks on Popa, whose words, he writes, "test their way forward, sensitive to their own
errors, dramatically and in
timately alive, like the antennae of some rock-shore creatures
feeling out the presence of the sea and the huge powers in it... There is a primitive pre~creation at
mosphere about his work, as if he were present where all
dynamisms and formulae were
ready and charged, but nothing created ? or only a few frag
ments/'
Probes to the underworld must, in our post-literate culture, be fashioned from a vast field of cluttered and vernacular ex
perience. To Hughes the con
temporary poet is thus a serious
scavenger. The litter of his world includes surreal experience: dreams, nightmares, madness, terror, bestiality, automatism.
We come upon Hughes himself
ransacking the movies, animated
cartoons, birthday card greet ings, folk songs, montage overloading, children's fables, whatever comes to the hand in a
wasting culture where ad
vertising has replaced literature as the imagination's image-pool and TV talk show-hosts are the models of intellect. Hughes's scavenging of the languages of all these media produces a boggling
mixture of tangent literary for ms: heroic epics, folk epic, myth, cycles. lyrics, chants, in cantations.
In this way, Hughes leaves the radio receiver turned on and
dutifully makes all the visits, standing "respectfully, hat in
hand, before this creation, ex
ceedingly alert for a new word.'5 We see this new type picking over the debris, turning up the dismembered corpse in the gar bage can. We see him crouched for cover in the doorway. Or we see him verging on the ridiculous in that extraordinary fable of the
poet Crow. The figure is hardly decorous. Crow, a survivor, seated we may believe in some cartoon pub, launches his pop Homeric epic: "There was this terrific battle ..." and so on.
But the portrait of Hughes's new poet also takes form in those
Page 16 The American Poetry Review
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
magnificent lines of Jocasta
(from his translation of Seneca's
Oedipus), as the bloody knot in the bessemer furnace of the world's body:
blood from my toes my finger ends
blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids
blood from the roots of my hair
blood from before
any time began it flowed into the knot of his bowels,
into the knot
of his muscles
the knot of his brain
my womb tied everything together every comer of the
earth and the heavens and every trickle of the dead past twisted it all into shape beside me
what was he what wasn Y he
the question was unasked
fOedipus, 23-25)
VII. A New Language The writer does not wrest
speech from silence as we are told in pious literary hagiographics, says Roland Barthes, but "in
versely, and how much more ar
duously, more cruelly and less
gloriously, he detaches a secon
dary language from the slime of
primary languages afforded him
by the world, history, his exist ence." Hughes has been intent on
extracting just such an exact
speech congruous to the con sciousness of the late twentieth
century. He calls this extraction
"utility" speech; that is, a
language ready for whatever ex
perience comes up, agile enough
to take whatever position it must, in all ways alert.
The animal figure together with Hughes's idea of the reach of dialect merge in his description of the style of Keith Douglas (1920 1944). It could deal, he said in an early essay, "with whatever it came up against, a versatile, ruthless, direct style not limited to certain subjects in certain
moods. It is a utility general purpose style, as for instance
Shakespeare's was; a style that combines a colloquial readiness and variety with a poetic breadth; a ritual intensity and music of an exceedingly high or der with a clear wholehearted passion."
Hughes's regard for directness and versatility is rooted in his ap preciation of Shakespeare's language. Unlike the atrophied system of bleats Hughes hears in
contemporary England, Shakespeare's language, he says, "has the air of being invented in a state of crisis, for a terribly urgent job, a homely spur-of-the moment improvisation out of whatever verbal scrap happens to be lying around, and this is exac
tly what real speech is." He finds a similar colloquial scavenging in
Emily Dickinson's language, a
"Shakespearean texture ... solid with metaphor, saturated with the homeliest imagery and ex
perience." What Hughes develops in Crow is this same
language "super-crude": "the
whole crush and cramming throw away expressiveness of it was
right at the heart of its dialect/' Hughes has reconnoitered the
arcadias and alleys of our available language. For Crow to articulate the ache of love, the Crow-Bard has available the lexicons of detergent ads, the
military, government releases, King Kong movies, industry board rooms, and urban politics. Hughes scoured his language of the early accretions: Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas ("we ran out, mice in our
pockets and straw in our hair,/In to the darkness that was avalan ching to horses/And a quake of hooves" (Lupercal 21). The Crow poems chronicle Crow's survival and give us the stripped language of that survival, rough and ready, equal to life, knowing all the angles, leering, a con-man's way, yet singing, library to street, in the contemporary rhythms we
recognize as our lives. There are in Crow, too, mo
ments of the ritual conjuring language we associate with the shaman's preparation. Some of it
begins the book: Black was the without eye Black the within tongue Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs Unable to suck in light.
(Crow, 1)
In his adaptation of Oedipus from Seneca, Hughes had already raised this incantatory language
(part of the utility) to its fullest power. There are in that play passages simultaneously or
dinary and ruthless, sounding (to use Hughes's terms) a ritual in
tensity and a full passion. Jocasta's lines reach with simple directness to the dark mysteries:
when I carried my sons
I carried them for death I car
ried them for the throne
I carried them for the final disaster when I carried
my first son
did I know what was coming did
I know
what ropes of blood were twisting
together what bloody footprints were hurrying together in my body
(Oedipus, 22)
Perhaps nowhere else in con
temporary poetry is there
language to surpass the brute
strength of some of the recitations in Hughes's Oedipus, Creon describes how the priest called up the creatures of the un derworld ?- death and hellish
dogs, Tiresias ? until King Laius rises to the surface, a specter summoned up from the world un der the world (the passage has direct ties to the poem "Pike," more than a decade earlier):
it lifted its face and I
recognized Laius
Our King Laius he pulled himself up it was
him his whole body was plastered with blood his
hair beard face all one terrible wound a mash of
In o series of worm,
personal recollections, novelist ond publisher D.M. Davin has drown
tellingly human portraits of seven of the great fellow
writers who were among his friends: Julian Maclaren
Ross, W. R. Rodgers, Louis
MacNeice, Enid Starkie, Joyce Gary, Dylan Thomas,
and Ifzik Manger.
CLOSING TIMES
D.Ni. Dovin Illustrated, $12.95
Donald Davie, one of
today's most distinguished poets and critics, draws on
personal memories of his
country's land, history, and
society in a series of
poems. He has described this collection?a poem for each county of England
?
as "mostly amiable and
nostalgic"
THE SHIRES Donald Davie
Illustrated, $7.95
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 200 Madison Avenue, New York, N Y. 10016
September/October 1975
One acclaimed young poet explores another
poet's life. This provocative work "evokes the period,
the ideology and the
background from which Owen came with some
thing like the fullness and the deliberation with which Lawrence and Joyce wrote
up their own early years.'' ?Times Literary
Supplement (London)
WILFRED OWEN Jon Stallworthy
With 80 illustrations. $ 17.50
Page 17
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
mud brains blood
(Oedipus, 52) This is utility language doing a
rough job; it also has starkly delicate moods. Jocasta, mad dened by her look into truth's socket, steps to Oedipus after he has gouged out his eyes:
what can I call you now what
shall I call you you 're my son shall I call you
my son
are you ashamed
you are my son I lost you
you 're alive I've found you
speak to me
show me your face turn your head toward me show
me your face
(Oedipus, 87-88)
Given the rudimentary in
tensity of language that Hughes can achieve, measuring the power he means to make it discharge, and sighting the other world he intends to exhume along its path, it is little wonder that he has
sought to close completely the cir cuit between language and the world under the world. His recent aim is a language absolutely of surface accretions. This is
possible only by distilling a previously unavailable purity of
expression. Hughes attempts this in Orghast, a play written in a
made-up language of the primary man. The premise, according to Tom Stoppard in an interview with Hughes, is that "the sound of the human voice, as opposed to
language, is capable of projecting very complicated mental states."
What we have in Orghast is the shamanic hope of raising the un derworld up through the surface Babel by a conjuring language devised as a game of sounds. In other words, Orghast (play and
language) is the product of the
merging of the shaman and the
gamesman, the one attempting to raise the raw dream of the un derlife and the other to give it voice. Stoppard quoted Peter
Brook, the director: "Orghast aims to be a leveller of audiences
by appealing not to semantic athleticism but to the instinctive
recognition of a 1 mental state'
within a sound. One can hardly imagine a bolder challenge to the limits of narrative." What does the word Orghast
mean? It is the product of two
roots, "or^g" and "ghast," which, according to Stoppard, Hughes has "pulled to the top of his con sciousness to provide sounds for 'life' and 'spirit, flame,' respec tively. 'Thus orghast,' Hughes explained, 'is the name for "the fire of being" ... and so,
metaphorically,"sun." '
Some
where between sun and life and spirit the Middle English word aghast floats up, too, ac
tivating another layer just below our consciousness. What's the
point? Hughes's remarkable ex
periment demonstrates the im
possibility of escaping totally from semantic habits without
simply writing noise-music; in other words, he has set a marker at the outermost boundary of
poetry that is made of words. Like Orghast, Crow is an
inevitable stage in Hughes's
drive for the instinctual center. The aim is a serious gaming with life, a folk-loring of it, a Popa izing of it. The trick is to hold contemporary experience in the terms that can contain it, without
losing the evidence of its density and its contradictions. Crow stands as a present culmination of
Hughes' s shamanic deep-diving for totemic powers to balance life's horrors and im
poverishments. The poet is no longer simply
watching, but has identified him self as man and poet with this black scavenger bird. As he said of Popa's survival method, games can grasp by their simple terms a
deeper than ordinary reality, "as
puppets are deeper than our human reality: the more human
they look and act the more elemental they seem."
VIII. New Folk Forms Fabling, like mathematics and
mythologies, supplies the terms and the strategies for managing that realm between our ordinary
minds and our deepest life. Crow, for all his simplicity as a fable
figure, initiates profound associations. He is, by a fresh
ingenuity, related in Hughes's mind to that chap Hamlet who also found himself directly in the
practical business of surviving. Hamlet, says Hughes, was in serted into the mythic conflict in
Shakespeare's mind represented by the deposed Goddess-figure Elizabeth and the "new Jehovah" James I. Hughes describes Hamlet: ''Mother-wet, weak
legged, horrified at the task, boggling." Crow's cathechism at the womb-door is Hamlet's
soliloquy for our own age, in con
temporary utility language: Who owns these questionable
brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wake fulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.
Crow is also more than Hamlet because he is less. He is not an idealist come to adjust a time out of joint, but a creature intent on
surviving whatever the times
(Crow, 3)
raise against him. He embodies the instinct in all of us. God is some executive, a kind of fum
bling division sales manager or chairman of the board. Crow is
stark, sinewy, undistracted by thoughts of a purpose. He is the
primary engine. He is the poet and the poet's poem. Against the
mystery of his existence, momen
tarily he defines (in one of the few
passages where he speaks) the
prophecy that grimaces inside him. It is to be inside the
mystery, to be inside his exist ence ((AS INSIDE MY OWN LAUGHTER/AND NOT STARING OUT AT IT THROUGH WALLS/OF MY EYE'S COLD QUARANTINE" {Crow, p. 11).
The terms of Hughes's un
dertaking in Crow are derivable from the terms by which he in
terprets Vasko Popa's later work. Crow entertains us even as it hauls us along the way stations of man's suffering, stupidity, and
longing. Hughes says of one of
Popa's grimly-playful poems: "It is all there, the surprising fusion of unlikely elements. The
sophisticated philosopher is also a primitive, gnomic spell-maker. The desolate view of the Universe
opens through eyes of childlike simplicity and moody oddness. The wide perspective of general elemental and biological law is
spelled out with folklore hieroglyphs and magical mon sters. The whole style is mar
vellously effective artistic in vention. It enables Popa to be as abstract as man can be, yet remain as intelligible and en
tertaining and as fully human as if he were telling a comic story.''
He calls Popa's mode the surrealism of folklore, and the discriminations he makes help us to grasp the radical character of this new poetic consciousness in
Hughes himself. The little fables or visionary anecdotes of Popa's, he says, show us "most clearly his shift from literary surrealism to the far older and deeper thing, the surrealism of folklore. The distinction between the two seems to lie in the fact that
literary surrealism is always con nected with an extreme remove from the business of living under
practical difficulties and suc
cessfully managing them. The
mind, having abandoned the
struggle with circumstances and
consequently lost the unifying focus that comes of that, has lost
morale and surrendered to the ar
bitrary imagery of the dream flow. Folktale surrealism, on the other hand, is always urgently connected with the business of
trying to manage practical dif ficulties so great that they have forced the sufferer temporarily out of the dimension of coherent
reality into the depth of imagination where understanding has its roots and stores its X
rays." The linkage of frames that
comprise the cyclic form of Crow communicates its own meaning, too. Hughes's remarks on Popa clarify his own procedures, and
we see another angle of the utility language. "The air of trial and error exploration, of an im
provised language, the attempt to
get near something for which he is almost having to invent the
words in a total disregard for
poetry or the normal conventions of discourse, goes with his habit of working in cycles of poems. He will trust no phrase with his
meaning for more than six or seven words at a time before he corrects his tack with another
phrase from a different direction. In the same way, he will trust no
poem with his meaning for more than fifteen or so lines, before he tries again from a totally dif ferent direction with another
poem. Each cycle creates the terms of a Universe, which he then explores, more or less
methodically, with the terms."
IX. To Conclude The common element in these
techniques is the need of men to face practical crises, to make life
manageable by clinging to the simple structures of it. The shaman's aesthetic penetrates to those brute simplicities and hauls them back to the surface. The
poet tries to reach beginnings also, seeking the raw dream in
simple fables, summoning shaman-like the dogs of energy up through the interstices in the civilized pavements.
The language of radical sub traction is the real cut of
Hughes's undertaking. Sometimes super-crude, it is a
language ready to undertake
anything human or creaturely. This is Hughes's great triumph, reducing language to its stark in
strumentality. The result is a
poetry of practical activity, the
fitting out of the tribe against the elaborate hostility of existence.
Like his Tomcat made of wor
ds, his poems prowl the slick car
pets of our above-ground lives and make our ignorance edgy. They are about their business of
trying to manage our practical difficulties.
The second collection of poems by the author
of Coming Close
CASTING STONES POEMS BY HELEN CHASIN
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series
$6.95 clothbound, $3.50 paperbound LITTLE, BROWN
Page 18 The American Poetry Review
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions