Top 6 - Ted Hughes

I heave the burly tome of Collected Ted across to the computer safe in the knowledge that I'm not going to have to read most of it. It has long been my considered opinion that his success with a certain sequence of poems took him off in a wrong direction and that his ideas about writing poetry prevented him from writing poems that I, personally, might have admired more. But it was up to him and every writer must do exactly what they feel like doing. Unfortunately, the restraints of this 'Top 6' feature mean that I can only mention 6 poems and so cannot be specific about where the wrong turn occured.

Now that it is 2010, it is pertinent to notice how the posthumous reputations of Ted, and his contemporary but very different rival in reputation, Philip Larkin, have been through vilification by the massed ranks of politically correct, feminist and other such ideologues to eventual re-evaluations when readers went back to look at the poetry and saw through their scapegoat status as betes noires for all the perceived ills of the world that seemed to need attacking at the time.

Tribute is paid elsewhere on this website to our schoolteacher, Linden Huddlestone, who introduced us to Ted Hughes at a fairly early stage of our literary learning. The simple fact that a poet could be called Ted was interesting enough to us then.

Later, in our first year sixth, Mr. Huddlestone put into practice his belief in a wider, liberal arts education and we 'read around' the subject, which included each of us being allocated a contemporary poem which we had to read and then talk about. And such was his belief in me that he put me on first to give my account of The Thought-Fox, which is both more and less than a characteristic Hughes nature poem because it is also a poem about writing a poem. Nowadays, of course, we might need a few less of such things but it seemed like a good idea at the time and the 'sudden sharp hot stink of fox' is only as important to this poem as the beginning, 'I imagine..', and the end, 'The page is printed.' But, either way, you don't study a poem like that aged 16 without remaining impressed for several decades and counting.

But it's not my favourite Hughes poem. That would be October Dawn, moving through consistently made half rhymes from the delicate 'premonition of ice' dreamed across the glass of wine left out all night to the 'tons of chain and massive lock' that might hold rivers, the re-introduction of the Ice Age and mammoth and sabre-tooth to the world. That's our Ted, never knowingly undersold when asked to find primitive power underneath the fragility of human experience.

Like many an appointed laureate, Hughes might have found himself producing poems that he might not otherwise have written. Lady Carol Ann's already done that and Sir Andrew was lukewarm more than once on such occasions. But Ted was probably even worse because he partly meant it but his first effort, A Raincharm for the Duchy, allegedly written for the birth of Prince Harry (whose truly royal credentials might still require some confirmation by DNA tests), was a tremendous opener. But it was suggested at the time, 1984, and looks just as much so now, that it might have been a Hughes poem about a deluge that was almost ready at the time and was dragged into laureate usefulness quite conveniently. That hardly matters. It is a wonderful poem.

The Hawk in the Rain might now be regarded as a starting point, a title taken for granted, somehow reduced in power because it became an early signature poem but it says here,

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

It is otherwise a very violent thing and hardly surprising that Hughes made such an early impact with such primordial subjects. That he was ever considered suitable for categorization with Thom Gunn, whose threats of violence were mere posture and who Ted quite rightly recognized as a 'poet of gentleness', looks strange now and critics and readers must be wary of such early assumptions.

Wolfwatching was the title poem of a volume that returned to shorter poems, which, to be fair, Ted had never stopped writing, somehow sadder but also inconsistently crazier in its support of conservation of species like the white rhino when Ted had done his bit to hunt and fish more plentiful types of animals to premature deaths. The wolf trapped within earshot of the 'roar of London' is sympathetic, a sympathy that wasn't immediately obvious in earlier poems.

And if the almost death-bed confession of Birthday Letters might have been valued for more prurient reasons than those of pure poetry appreciation, I can hardly help but include You Hated Spain with its,

You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin

and other raw insights into not just Sylvia, but Spain and the more expected Hughes themes. Including that poem means leaving out others than ought to have been certainties for such a selection.

Whenever I look at Ted I am reminded that although he really wasn't exactly my sort of poet, he was a tremendous one by any other criteria. And, yet again, another brief look at him has been quite rewarding.