Ted Hughes Alternative Horizons

169 Pages·2005·1.74 MB·English

by  Joanny Moulin

TED HUGHES: ALTERNATIVE HORIZONS
CONTEXT AND GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Series Editors:
Peter J.Kitson, Department of English, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
William Baker, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb,
USA
Ted Hughes: Alternative
Horizons
EDITED BY
JOANNY MOULIN
LONDON AND NEW YORK
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
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author for any damage to property or persons as a result of operation or use of this
publication and/or the information contained herein.
Published by: Taylor & Francis The Netherlands, Lisse
http://www.tandf.co.uk/books
ISBN 0-203-01798-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 90 265 1973 7 (Print Edition)
ISSN 1573-2320
Contents
Series Preface vii
Foreword v iii
Joanny Moulin
The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters 1
Leonard M.Scigaj
Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination of Ted Hughes in the 1
Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Gayle Wurst
Complicated with Old Ghosts: The Assia Poems 14
Carol Bere
“Dead Farms, Dead Leaves:” Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet & 23
Elmet
Terry Gifford
Ted Hughes’s Crying Horizons: “Wind” & the Poetics of Sublimity 32
Christian La Cassagnère
Poetry & Magic 40
Ann Skea
Self-Revelation, Self-Concealment & the Making of the Ted Hughes 50
Archive
Stephen Enniss
Drives & their Vicissitudes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes 60
Axel Nesme
Hughes & the Female Addressee 79
Neil J.Roberts
Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method 86
Joanny Moulin
In Search of the Autobiography of Ted Hughes 93
Diane Wood Middlebrook
vi
“Earth-Moon:” Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (& Adults) 1 01
Claas Kazzer
Ted Hughes & the Folk Tale 1 15
Paul Volsik
List of Contributors 1 25
Works Cited 1 28
Abbreviations 1 35
Index of Names and Titles 1 38
Series Preface
Context and Genre in English Literature
The aim of the Context and Genre in English Literature series is to place bodies
of prose, poetry, and drama in their historical, literary, intellectual or generic
contexts. It seeks to present new work and scholarship in a way that is informed
by contemporary debates in literary criticism and current methodological
practices.
The various contextual approaches reflect the great diversity of the books in
the series. Three leading categories of approaches can be discerned. The first
category, consisting of historical and philological approaches, covers subjects
that range from marginal glosses in medieval manuscripts to the interaction
between folklore and literature. The second category, of cultural and theoretical
approaches, covers subjects as diverse as changing perceptions of childhood as a
background to children’s literature on the one hand and queer theory and
translation studies on the other. Finally, the third category consists of single
author studies informed by contextual approaches from either one of the first two
categories.
Context and Genre in English Literature covers a diverse body of writing,
ranging over a substantial historical span and featuring widely divergent
approaches from current and innovative scholars; it features criticism of writing
in English from different cultures; and it covers both canonical literature and
emerging and new literatures. Thus the series aims to make a distinctive and
substantial impact on the field of literary studies
Foreword
The authors of this collection of essays have been chosen so as to span a large
spectrum of approaches to the poetry of Ted Hughes, instead of favouring one
line of criticism as opposed to others. The initial purpose of the project was to
bring together writers whose divergent opinions and theories promised mind-
opening contrasts. Although these authors are from five different countries, they
belong basically to three critical traditions. Some markedly post-structuralist
continental European papers turn resolutely to a close re-reading of the poetic
texts themselves, and in so doing, serve, in part, as neutral ground for an
encounter between milder representatives of the recent, and often opposed,
tendencies in British and American critical readings. While most English experts
often have a propensity for hagiography, the American reception of Hughes’s
poetry has remained engrossed in, and conditioned by, a debate about his
responsibility in the suicide of Sylvia Plath, sometimes at the excessive cost of
no longer reading the poetry, except from this biographical vantage. But even
here, new assessment is needed after Hughes’s own copious, albeit partial
treatment in Birthday Letters of the issues involved in his life with Plath.
However, the main argument of this book lies elsewhere, and is a theoretical
one. Unsurprisingly for one who trained in social anthropology as well as in
English literature in the Cambridge of the 1950s, Ted Hughes was a
cryptostructuralist of sorts, at least until the late 1970s, but with a marked
preference for Jungian theory, which implicitly dominates most of his ethics and
Weltanschauung. This helps to explain why, except in a few recent instances, the
main body of existing criticism concerning Hughes’s poetry draws
predominantly on Jungian psychology. This poses a problem of method, since,
with varying degrees of intensity, criticism tends to relay the poet’s own critical
discourse, not only without acknowledging the fact, but perhaps without even
being aware of it. This is all the more striking considering that, as his career
gathered momentum and he became an established figure, Hughes’s discourse
became more and more overtly ideological. For all that, the essays collected in this
book are not concerned with erecting a barrage of counter-discourse, but rather to
avoid yet another critical pitfall, that lies in Hughes’s mostly involuntary
tendency to push his readers to take sides and to enlist either as fans or as
detractors. Over and against partisanship, the plurality of approach to be found in
ix
this collection should be seen as a search for different ways to steer Hughes
criticism gently but firmly out of the ruts of certain well-travelled avenues.
Impartial assessment is, to be sure, the best service that can be rendered to
Hughes’s poetry, by helping to ensure that one of the most powerful poetic
achievements of the twentieth-century is no longer stranded in biographical or
psychological sands. This collection of essays is the first to be produced since the
poet’s death and presents a good sample of directions in academic research
devoted to the poetry of Ted Hughes at the turn of the century. It is meant as a
continuation of Hughes studies and a tentative broadening of their perspectives.
Joanny Moulin