Abstract
This chapter begins by offering an aesthetic account of Ted Hughes’s animal poetry, emphasising issues of sound, cadence, stress, rhythm and metre. It argues that Hughes strains towards a verbal sensuousness in his attempts to figure the animal in verse, a rhythmic tactility by which he tries to place the reader in vibrant contact with the surrounding world. The poems, that is to say, not only represent animals semantically—through the interplay of sign and signifier—but conjure up animal life by becoming expressive instances of the energies they invoke. How Hughes achieves this—and the ethical implications of his doing so—is one of my key concerns. The second half of this chapter examines a different aspect of his poetry: the relationship between historical experience and the figure of the animal. It explores how deeply preoccupied Hughes was by the social memory of war and industrialisation, and how these experiences shape his representations of the natural world. On one level, Hughes was drawn to animals as an alternative to civilisation and its perceived discontents: living what he called ‘the redeemed life of joy’, they were figures of vitality and health. However, animals in his imagination are also haunted by the very forces from which he sought respite: war, industrialisation, capitalism, technological modernity. Thus, if Hughes turns towards nature as a source of health and redemption, the historical experiences that impelled him to do so in the first place also compromised nature as a source of health. Chapter 4 shows how this insoluble dialectic—between nature and culture, wildness and modernity—runs through the heart of Hughes’s poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Ted Hughes, ‘Capturing Animals’ in Poetry in the Making (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 15–31 (p. 15).
- 2.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 4.
Quoted in Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (Armidale: University of New England Press, 1994), p. 176.
- 5.
Hughes, Poetry in the Making, p. 15.
- 6.
Hughes, Poetry in the Making, p. 17.
- 7.
Ted Hughes, ‘The Art of Poetry’, No. 71, interview with Drue Heinz, The Paris Review, no. 134 (Spring 1995).
- 8.
Hughes, ‘Words and Experience’ in Poetry in the Making, pp. 118–124 (p. 119).
- 9.
Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 56.
- 10.
Alice Oswald, introduction to A Ted Hughes Bestiary (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), pp. xiii–xvi (p. xv).
- 11.
Ted Hughes, ‘Desk Poet’, interview with John Horder, The Guardian, 23 March 1965.
- 12.
Craig Robinson, Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p. 22; Seamus Heaney, ‘A Great Man and a Great Poet’, The Observer, Sunday 16 May 1999.
- 13.
Seamus Heaney, interview with John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 73–74.
- 14.
Alice Oswald, ‘Wild Things’, The Guardian, 3 December 2005.
- 15.
Marianne Moore, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, p. 634.
- 16.
Edwin Muir, New Statesman, 28 September 1957; W. S. Merwin, ‘Something of His Own to Say’, The New York Times, 6 October 1957.
- 17.
Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 28.
- 18.
In a short note on ‘The Thought-Fox’, entitled ‘The Burnt Fox’, Hughes recalls the curious circumstances in which the poem came to be written. One night as a student at the University of Cambridge, he says, the figure of the fox appeared to him in a dream. It walked up to his desk, laid a bloody paw on an essay he was struggling to write, and then said, ‘Stop this—you are destroying us.’ The ‘impression of reality was so total’, Hughes remarks, that, upon waking, he was ‘quite certain’ that he would see ‘the blood-print there on the page’ (WP 8–9). Hughes took the dream as an injunction to privilege poetry over prose, and remarks that the poem that resulted from it is still ‘very real to me’. ‘As I read it’, he says of the poem, ‘I see [the fox] move, I see it setting its prints, I see its shadow going over the irregular surface of the snow’. Hughes, Poetry in the Making, p. 20.
- 19.
Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’ in The Poems of Marianne Moore, p. 135. As Neil Roberts points out, the title of Hughes’s poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’, is a poetic statement of its own. ‘The title, with its hyphen, means not a thought about a fox, or a fox that exists only in thought, but a thought that is a fox. Hughes does everything possible to suggest that the agency of creating the poem has passed from the speaker to the fox’. Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, p. 21.
- 20.
Michael Hofmann, ‘Remembering Tehran’ in The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, edited by Nick Gammage (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 167–174 (p. 174).
- 21.
Oswald, ‘Wild Things’.
- 22.
Neil Corcoran, ‘A Nation of Selves: Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare’ in This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, edited by Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 185–200 (p. 189); David Sergeant, ‘Ted Hughes’s Inner Music’ in Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected, edited by Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford (Basingstoke: Palgrave: 2013), pp. 48–63 (pp. 51–52).
- 23.
In an astute reading of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, Roberts shows, among other things, how the majority of the keywords come from French. Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, pp. 26–27.
- 24.
Simon Armitage, introduction to Ted Hughes: Poems Selected by Simon Armitage (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. ix–xv (p. xiv).
- 25.
Hughes quoted in Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 203.
- 26.
Paul Bentley, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond (Harlow: Longman, 1998), p. 1. Oswald writes: ‘What is it that turns language into an animal? What gives poems a “vivid life” of their own, such that “nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them”? I think, in Hughes’s case, it’s a matter of percussion. There is something irresistible about the rhythm of a Hughes poem, which makes every word of it connected and essential.’ Alice Oswald, ‘Ted Hughes’s Poetry: Wild at Heart’, The Guardian, 28 August 2014.
- 27.
‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, interview with Ekbert Fass in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1980), pp. 197–208 (p. 201).
- 28.
Indeed, Bentley suggests that Hughes’s most controversial poems are pitched towards a middle-class reading culture. Paul Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 37.
- 29.
The New Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Al Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 25.
- 30.
John Felstiner, ‘Ted Hughes Capturing Pike’ in Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 327–334 (p. 330).
- 31.
Ted Hughes quoted in Worlds: Seven Modern Poets, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1974), p. 126.
- 32.
Alan Brownjohn, ‘The Brutal Tone’, Listen 2:4 (Spring 1958); J. M. Newton, ‘Mr Hughes’s Poetry’, Delta 25 (Winter 1961): 6–12.
- 33.
John Lucas, Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1986), p. 196.
- 34.
Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 115.
- 35.
Geoffrey Thurley, The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p. 174.
- 36.
Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 107.
- 37.
Ekbert Fass, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 199.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 39.
Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence, p. 2.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 94.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 39, p. 133 (my emphasis).
- 43.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 53–54.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 46.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 13.
- 47.
Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 58. ‘Becoming-animal’, Calarco explains, constitutes nothing less than a ‘refusal to enact the ideals and subjectivity that the dominant culture associates with being a full human subject and to enter into a relation with the various minor, or nondominant modes of existence that are commonly viewed as being the “other” of the human’. Ibid., p. 57.
- 48.
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, p. 52.
- 49.
Ramanan quoted in Lucas, Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes, p. 194; Helen Vendler, ‘Ted Hughes’ in The Music of What Happens (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 197–208 (p. 198).
- 50.
Bromwich, Skeptical Music, p. 163 (my italics).
- 51.
Tom Paulin, ‘Laureate of the Free Market: Ted Hughes’ in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). pp. 252–275 (p. 252).
- 52.
Ted Hughes quoted in Worlds: Seven Modern Poets, Summerfield, ed., p. 122.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 124.
- 54.
Steve Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 10.
- 55.
Adam Piette, Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 123. Of course, Hughes is not the first English poet to project dark anxieties onto birds like the thrush, traditionally associated in English poetry with innocence and purity. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), Michael O’Neill points out, was ‘written on the dawn of the twentieth century’ and is ‘full of transitional forebodings.’ Michael O’Neill, The Cambridge History of English Poetry, edited by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 739. But there is also a crucial difference between Hardy’s and Hughes’s thrush: whereas the former projects a sense of anxiety onto his ‘frail’ creature, Hughes’s bird, having merged with something profoundly non-organic, is internally reconstituted by images from modernity.
- 56.
Paulin, ‘Laureate of the Free Market: Ted Hughes’, p. 254.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 123.
- 59.
Raymond Morrow, ‘Mannheim and the Early Frankfurt School: The Weber Reception of Rival Traditions of Critical Sociology’ in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, edited by Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 169–194 (p. 169).
- 60.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 123, my italics.
- 61.
John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1984), pp. 1–26 (p. 19).
- 62.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 63.
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 65.
Mathew Calarco draws the distinction between ‘critical animal studies’ and other forms of animal-related inquiry thus: ‘Critical animal studies is often distinguished from other approaches to animal issues, such as animal studies, animal ethics, and so on, with critical animal studies understood as being more explicitly and radically political and the latter approaches as moderately political or even apolitical’. Mathew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction, p. 2.
- 66.
Paulin, ‘Laureate of the Free Market: Ted Hughes’, p. 254.
- 67.
According to Peter Baehr, ‘iron cage’ does not adequately convey the meaning of Weber’s original formulation. He argues that Weber’s phrase, ‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’, might better be rendered as ‘shell as hard as steel’. This does not have the resonance of ‘iron cage’, Baehr admits, but he argues it is both closer to Weber’s intended meaning and ‘more troubling’: the ‘habitation of a steel shell implies not only a new dwelling for modern human beings, but a transformed nature.’ Whereas a ‘cage deprives one of liberty, but leaves one otherwise unaltered’, the image of a shell, which is ‘part of the organism and cannot be dispensed with’, suggests the ‘organic reconstitution of the being concerned’. Peter Baehr, ‘The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, History and Theory, 40. 2 (May, 2001): 153–169.
- 68.
Hughes felt the same way about the fox, a creature he tried to ‘capture’ more than once. He talks about the twitch and craning of its ears, the slight tremor of its hanging tongue and its breath making little clouds, its teeth bared in the cold, the snow-crumbs dropping from its pads as it lifts each one in turn. Quoted in Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth?, p. 328.
- 69.
Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore, p. 266.
- 70.
For the authoritative version of Crow’s creation, see Keith Sagar’s, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 172–175. Sagar was one of Hughes’s friends and long-time correspondents.
- 71.
‘Ted Hughes’s Crow’, The Listener, 30 July 1970.
- 72.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (London: Granta, 1997), p. 34.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 74.
James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 34.
- 75.
Carolyn Forché, introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 29–47 (p. 43).
- 76.
Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 208.
- 77.
Boria Sax, Crow (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 35.
- 78.
See, for example, David Lodge, ‘Crow and the Cartoon’ in Working with Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 167–174.
- 79.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Fox’ in Fox: Poems 1998–2000 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 25.
- 80.
John Berger, ‘A Master of Pitilessness?’ in Hold Everything Dear (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 85–89, (p. 86).
- 81.
Initially, Hughes was not impressed by Bacon’s work. In the same letter, recalling a ‘small exhibit’ of the artist’s paintings in 1960, he describes his sense of ‘general revulsion’ at what he saw (LTH 203).
- 82.
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 11.
- 83.
Berger, ‘A Master of Pitilessness?’, p. 86 (my italics).
- 84.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 85.
Francis Bacon, interview by Francis Giacobetti (conducted 1992), published in The Art Newspaper, no. 137 (June 2003): 28–29, 28. In the same interview, Bacon remarks that ‘flesh and meat are life!’ and that there is ‘no difference between [human] meat and the meat of an ox or an elephant’ (28).
- 86.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 17.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 88.
Neil Roberts, A Literary Life, p. 74.
- 89.
The same observation can be extended to two other collections that are closely related to Crow: Cave Birds (1975) and Gaudete (1977).
- 90.
Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 112–127 (p. 118).
- 91.
In this context, the clearest indication of the modernity of Crow is that it fails to synthesise its own insights. Corcoran observes that where ‘Blake had his visions’ and ‘Yeats had his Vision’, Hughes’s ‘intimations’ could not be ‘unified’ into a ‘system’. ‘In contemporary poetry’, he adds, ‘the vatic is itself liable to seem hollow very quickly; and in Ted Hughes’s work we may have witnessed its final disappearance as a possibility for English poetry.’ Ibid., p. 118.
- 92.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Omen and Amen: On “Littleblood”’ in The Epic Poise, pp. 59–61 (p. 61).
- 93.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 94.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 95.
The animal body as the site of working through pain remains a powerful motif in contemporary British writing. In Derryn Rees-Jones’s ‘Dogwoman’, a poetic sequence from Burying the Wren (Bridgend: Seren, 2012), the grieving speaker of the poem takes the form of a woman who is also a dog: ‘I’m crouched between my own thighs//with my dog heart and my dog soul.’ As with Crow, consolation is impossible to reach in language (‘Words now are never enough’, we are told), and yet Rees-Jones’s sequence is sustained by a kind of unflagging biological optimism: out of ‘blood’ and ‘debris’, a dog-soul, ‘doggedly dogging’, is ‘being born’ (p. 16, p. 19). Two other recent publications, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014) and Max Porter’s Grief is a Thing with Feathers (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), explore similar territory.
- 96.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013).
- 97.
Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 2.
- 98.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 99.
Darwin quoted in Grosz, p. 17.
- 100.
Ibid.
- 101.
‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind, p. 333.
- 102.
Ibid.
- 103.
For more on this issue, Kate Soper, ‘The Humanism in Posthumanism’, Comparative Critical Studies 9. 3 (2012): 365–378; and Carey Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
- 104.
Oswald, ‘Ted Hughes’s Poetry: Wild at Heart’.
- 105.
Keith Sagar, Ted Hughes and Nature: ‘Terror and Exultation’ (Peterborough: FastPrint, 2009), p. xiv; Anna Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and the British Bardic Tradition’, Symposium Paper, December 1994 <http://ann.skea.com/cairo.htm> accessed 09.06.17.
- 106.
Bromwich, Skeptical Music, p. 165, p. 166.
- 107.
In describing salmon in these terms, Hughes seems to be drawing on a number of associations: the fish’s sheer profligacy during mating season (at any one time, and depending on the species, a salmon nest may contain between 500 and 2000 eggs); the salmon’s famous ability to return to its natal rivers when ready to spawn—a feat some biologists attribute to specialised cells that allow the fish to tune into the earth’s magnetic fields; and the extraordinary changes salmon undergo throughout their lives, at their most intense when they return to rivers after spending most of their lives in the ocean.
- 108.
Bromwich, Skeptical Music, p. 169.
- 109.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Fish’ in Selected Poems, edited by Mara Kalnins (London: Dent, 1992), p. 117.
- 110.
Hughes, River, p. 77.
- 111.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in The Poems, edited by Richard Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 194.
- 112.
Michael Wood, introduction to Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. ix.
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Malay, M. (2018). Rhythmic Contact: Ted Hughes and Animal Life. In: The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70666-5_3
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