Ted Hughes

A ghost crab sidled into his body
By moonlight
Laid its thousand eggs.

When that oak fell a tremor passed
Through all the rivers of the West.
The spent salmon felt it.

A rare familiar voice
Entered the October silence
While red leaves fell.

‘Virtue’, said Marcus Aurelius, ‘what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?’ Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same ― to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

The natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the presupposition of the absolute which grounds, delimits, animates and directs it, without which it would be unthinkable, absurd and superfluous, and which we can only quietly respect. Any attempt to spurn it, master it or replace it with something else, appears, within the framework of the natural world, as an expression of hubris for which humans must pay a heavy price, as did Don Juan and Faust.

The story of mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man. … When something abandons Nature, or is abandoned by Nature, it has lost touch with its creator, and is called an evolutionary dead-end. … When the modern mediumistic artist looks into his crystal, he sees the last nightmare of mental disintegration and spiritual emptiness. … But he may see something else … the vital, somewhat terrible spirit of natural life, which is new in every second. Even when it is poisoned to the point of death, its efforts to be itself are new in every second.

The poetry of Hughes has brought us, in the most exact sense, closer to nature, its complex workings, than any English poet we can think of … It is a poetry of exultation.

Acknowledgements
Fortunately for all of us, Hughes studies is a highly collaborative field. I am most grateful for the help I have received from many other Hughes critics and scholars, most notably from Ann Skea, Neil Roberts, Terry Gifford and Ehor Boyanowsky.

All quotations from Hughes’ unpublished work are by kind permission of the Hughes Estate.

Preface
The centrality of nature in Hughes’ work has been obvious from the publication of The Hawk in the Rain over half a century ago, and much has been written on it. However, it has seemed to me in recent years that critical commentary on this essential theme, including my own, has remained fairly superficial. The main purpose of this book is to try to take it, in several ways, onto another level. The publication of Hughes’ letters in 2007 has given us the opportunity to relate his poems more closely to his life and reading; but I also wanted to give it a larger context by relating it (as Hughes himself did so often in his prose) to the whole history of our relationship with nature since the dawn of civilization, and the tradition of nature-poetry in English.

We know that Hughes had a very good education at Mexborough Grammar School and Cambridge, that he received much encouragement from his mother and sister, and that he read voraciously beyond his school and university syllabuses. Thus most of the literature I have discussed in the first chapter would have been familiar to him by the time he graduated, and hugely influential. However it seemed to me useful to try to distinguish between those influences which were part of our common cultural and literary inheritance, in the first chapter, and those which were more specific to Hughes in the second. I have obviously made no attempt to discuss, or even list, all the influences I am aware of, which would themselves have been only a tiny proportion. I have concentrated on influences specifically on Hughes’ poetic response to nature, and on those influences he seems to have been himself most aware of.

Many years ago I devised a course for my adult students called Orientations in Modern Literature. The idea was to attempt to locate each writer on a compass, on which the cardinal points would represent the four basic attitudes to nature which seemed to me to be possible. The allocation of points to attitudes was arbitrary, but had some slight logic. North, being bleak, I assigned to the belief that life is nasty, brutish and short, meaningless and irredeemable. One writer who could be located here is obviously Samuel Beckett. South, representing the warmest and most affirmative position would stand for the opposite belief, that life is wonderful, perhaps sacred, and either self-redeeming or not in need of redemption. Here I placed (provisionally) D. H. Lawrence. The belief that life on earth is not the ultimate reality, and that it needs to be redeemed in terms of a purely spiritual reality outside time and space, I allocated to East, since we associate the east with mystical and transcendental thought. Here I placed the Eliot of the Four Quartets. The West we associate with rationalism, secularism, science; with the view that the defects of nature can be mitigated by political and social action, that civilization can gradually improve the world. Here I placed Brecht. Many writers, of course, would need to be placed at intermediate positions.

What proved most interesting about this scheme was the demonstration of
how many of the great writers in the course of their careers moved significantly around the compass. (Shakespeare seems to have occupied every possible position at one time or another.) Hughes is particularly interesting in this context since he moved from north via east to south, but in doing so did not betray the harsher truths by sentimentality or by succumbing to the glamour of the universe. He strove rather to hold together Coleridge’s vision of Nature as ‘the wary, wily old long-breathed witch, tough-lived as a turtle’ with the claim that she is also ‘Heaven’s Mother’, her undeniable role as ‘the putrefying oceanic grave’ with he equally, for him, undeniable role as ‘the radiant cauldron of abounding new life, the river of erotic song and the sacred word’ [Winter Pollen 440].

In his 1970 review of Max Nicholson’s The Environmental RevoutionI Hughes praised Nicholson’s ‘tremendous imaginative grasp of the true life of the earth, the inner spiritual unity of nature’. But he believed that poetry was the language best qualified to bring home to readers ‘the actualities of the earth’s life’ and the ‘inter-relationship of Nature and the inmost psychology of man’ in such a way as to permanently affect the reader’s own vision, and that became the ultimate objective of his own poems. Yet only ten years earlier Hughes had described nature as ‘brainless & the whole of evil’. This transformation needed to be documented and accounted for. Hughes’ negotiations with nature are inseparable from his simultaneous dialogue with all the earlier writers who had undertaken similar negotiations.

Book-length critical studies of Hughes’ poetry began to appear before the mid-point of his career. The downside of this early recognition of his importance was that a view of Hughes as a poet began to consolidate based, of necessity, on his early work. Later studies were of course able to add chapters on later collections, but the damage had been done in that many readers seem to have formed the opinion that Hughes had reached his peak in Crow (which was widely misunderstood) and that the later collections were either repetition or digression or decline, a decline dramatically reversed in his final collection Birthday Letters. A bias against or neglect of these is still widely evident.

I believe that Hughes’ finest and most important work, for which all the earlier books were preparation, is to be found in the three collections published between 1979 and 1983, Moortown, Remains of Elmet and River. Surprisingly, these collections have received far less attention than Hughes’ earlier and later work. Hughes’ poetic career is a continuum, each phase comprehensible only in terms of what had led up to it. Therefore I shall survey the core of that quest, his struggle to get into a right relation with the source, that is, with Nature and the female, from the beginning. Each collection is not simply a batch of his latest work, but a bulletin from the latest stage of an ongoing imaginative quest, which, after a phase of intense suffering following the tragic events of his life in 1963 and 1969, gradually succeeded in transforming that suffering into enlightenment. Hughes put himself in the dock in the shape of a succession of alter-egos, and underwent correction and rebirth.

Hughes believed that poetry is part of the self-healing equipment of the psyche; that if the poet, as Adam, as Everyman, can heal himself, that healing power can be transmitted through the imaginative experience of reading the poems, to the psyche of the reader. The great poems of the seventies and early eighties are the culmination of his quest. It is in these three collections that Hughes finally resolved the problems he had hitherto wrestled with in relation to nature and the female, and was able to worship the source of life in verse which is simultaneously radiant, yet rooted in the elements – air, stone, earth, water.

The poems collected in Moortown span the crucial period from the agony of the protagonist in Prometheus on his Crag, through the humility and acceptance of the farming poems, to the awakening of Adam to the limitations and potentialities of the human condition in Adam and the Sacred Nine. The epilogue poems in Gaudete have an importance extending far beyond the context of that book. Hughes’ discovery of vacanas released a vein of direct, powerful and personal verse which revitalized his subsequent work. Remains of Elmet is a lament for the cost of the Industrial Revolution both to the environment and to its inhabitants, but also a celebration of nature’s powers of regeneration. River, the acme of Hughes’ achievement, takes rivers to be the bloodstream of the goddess, Nature, and contributes more than any other collection to the respiritualization of a fallen world.
Almost all Hughes’ collections were very carefully planned, in accordance with some overview which had for him a specific mythic, or astrological, or alchemical, or cabbalistic significance. Since he knew that very few of his readers would be aware of any of this, he must have believed that such structures would have a subliminal influence on the reader’s response to the whole collection. Thus he regarded it as particularly important that his collections should have a positive, or, as he put it, ‘up-beat’ ending. There was, however, a price to pay for these imposed structures. For the sake of them Hughes can be draconian, distorting the original meaning of the poems to make them fit the postconceived pattern. They also frequently violate the chronology of the poems, and thereby distort or falsify our sense of Hughes’ development, of the relationship between the poems and the life. Hughes described his own poems as bulletins from the battleground of warring forces within him. It is surely important that such bulletins should arrive in the correct order. I shall therefore attempt to discuss the poems in as exact a chronological sequence as I can establish.

The attraction for him of all the structures and systems Hughes devised or exploited as frameworks for his poems was that they put a smokescreen between the life and the art, kept separate, as Eliot had required, ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’ [Selected Essays 18]. ‘It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life,’ Eliot wrote, ‘that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting’. Poetry, he claimed, was an escape from emotion and personality. In later years Eliot came to admit the hypocrisy of those claims, when he described ‘The Waste Land’ as ‘a wholly personal grouse against life’. Hughes needed such an escape even more than Eliot, but after Cave Birds his poems become more personal, more keyed to the events of his life, the daily struggle of farming in Moortown Diaries, his recovery of his own childhood world in Remains of Elmet, and his revitalizing encounters with the very body of the goddess in River.

The Laughter of Foxes surveys the whole of Hughes' achievement, not only in verse. It contains a great deal of new information, including extracts from Hughes' letters to the author, a detailed chronology of his life and work by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the background story of Crow. There are chapters on the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship of Hughes and Plath, and on the evolution of a Hughes poem through all its manuscript drafts. But the main purpose of the book is to attempt an adequate reading of Hughes' poetry, revealing the underlying quest which transformed his imagination, leading him by painful stages from a vision of a world made of blood to a vision of a world made of light.

'Sagar's strength is his ability to appreciate from the inside the mythic journey which Hughes was undertaking through his work. Sagar's fine and sensitive book is proof that penetrating critical thought can be couched in lively and readable prose'

'In an age when most of what passes for literary criticism is of interest to no-one but initiates of its own scarcely penetrable codes, here is a book which continually reminds us what an enlarging joy and privilege and challenge it is to read the work of a master-poet. In doing so, it performs a valuable service both to its subject and to the wider evolution of consciousness in our time. Whether poetry matters to us or not, the responsibility remains with each of us to bring to our lives the highest degree of ethical commitment and imaginative energy of which we are capable. And in that struggle, as the life and work of Ted Hughes so magnificently demonstrate, poetry can be far more than the consolation of an idle hour: it becomes a vital source of transforming energy'

'The Laughter of Foxes undertakes the necessary labour of fitting to the poetry the paradigms worked out in Hughes' fascinating mytho-critical prose from the 1990s. ... The central chapter, 'From World of Blood to World of Light', convincingly plots Hughes' progression towards a potentially redemptive vision.'

Dr Sagar believes that when we see Ted Hughes' work as a whole, with each book a stage in a psychic adventure involving new stylistic challenge, we shall see it to be the achievement of a major poet. In this study of Ted Hughes, Dr Sagar gives most of his attention to individual poems, their meaning and coherence, their relation to each other and to the poetic tradition, their sources and background (often in mythology and folklore), and their relevance to living in our time. He began reading Hughes in 1957 when The Hawk in the Rain appeared, and has followed his development closely ever since: here, with benefit of hindsight, he attempts to retrace that journey. A chapter is devoted to each major work.

Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1975, Hughes published three important collections. Season Songs in 1976, Gaudete in 1977, and Cave Birds in 1978. All represent important stages in Hughes' development. For this second edition, Dr Sagar added a chapter on each of these, revised the earlier text, and brought the comprehensive bibliography up to 1978.

'Sagar is a convinced and, on the whole, convincing reader of Hughes' poems; he thinks they are among the superior achievements of modern poetry ... I am glad that Sagar's book will raise questions that are crucial not only to the reception of Hughes' poetry but to the definition of contemporary English feeling.'

Denis Donoghue, New Republic

'The Thought-Fox' is, for many readers, especially young readers, their favourite Hughes poem. The mere glance I gave the poem in The Art of Ted Hughes is completely inadequate. There was even less excuse for neglecting the poem in The Laughter of Foxes. I have tried to do justice to it in the essay which can be downloaded free here.
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Letters
The 143 letters Hughes wrote to me are now at the British Library. A full description of them by Christina Patterson appeared in The Guardian 18 August 2001.

First Editions. I have most of Hughes' first editions for sale, including limited editions. Send wants lists to keithsagar@tiscali.co.uk

Links
Centre for Ted Hughes Studies. An educational site for students and researchers on the writings of Ted Hughes.

TED HUGHES

TED HUGHES AND NATURE:
‘TERROR AND EXULTATION’

TED HUGHES

TED HUGHES AND NATURE: ‘TERROR AND EXULTATION’

TED HUGHES AND NATURE:
‘TERROR AND EXULTATION’