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In the 1950’s, so some books tell us, English poetry
saw the arrival of a new generation of poets, and the three major figures were
Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. They were not similar. One could see
them as three points, or sides, of a triangle.
The joint Selected
Poems of Gunn and Hughes bracketed them together misleadingly. Contractual
difficulties meant that Larkin was not included. It might have made it clearer
that Gunn and Hughes were not such an item if Larkin had been there to
chaperone them but any semblance of kinship, based on machismo and attitudes of
violence, at least briefly, seemed to lead to a misunderstanding. Gunn adopted
‘postures for combat’ towards the world, either ironically or as a disguise,
whereas Ted’s early poems recognized, captured and possibly celebrated nature
‘red in tooth and claw’ and the violence is as real as anything in poetry can
be said to be ‘real’.
In the famous introduction to The New Poetry, in 1962, Al Alvarez went to great lengths to compare
Hughes’ A Dream of Horses with Larkin’s At Grass, that describes retired
racehorses, and conclude in favour of the perceived risk-taking, vital and
exciting Hughes poem compared to the ‘gentility’ of the Larkin poem, which he
concedes is ‘more skilful but less urgent’. The implications of what Alvarez
was saying were darker than that, though, and so it turned out.
Hughes’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published to some critical acclaim and so
he can never really have known what it was like not to be a poetry superstar.
His first three books were dominated by, but not exclusively about, animals and
nature- birds of prey, a fox, jaguar, otter and they were admired for their
animal nature. Crow: from The Life and
Songs of the Crow, in 1970, developed the theme by re-making the Creation
story with the uncompromisingly pitiless figure of Crow in the place of God. Of
those poems he said, ‘the idea was originally just to write his songs’,
songs
with no music whatsoever, in a super-simple and a super-ugly language which
would shed everything except just what he wanted to say
He also explained that its free verse style had been
adopted because,
the
very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing
one’s own tune against that choir.
For better and worse, Crow was a great success and further enhanced Ted’s reputation.
For better because it was a major new thing in English poetry and was exciting
at the time and probably still is for many. For worse possibly because it took
him off further into that method of myth-making, primitive, some might say
‘anti-poetry’. In pop music terms it might be compared with heavy metal, very
broadly. From then on, most of his books were themed, rugged free verse on such
subjects as Prometheus, the Seasons, the dark narrative of Gaudete, The Remains of Elmet about Yorkshire and Moortown Diaries about farming in Devon.
John Betjeman died in May 1984. It was widely assumed
that Larkin would be the next Poet Laureate but he didn’t want the job so Ted was
appointed in December.
Raincharm
for the Duchy appeared in print remarkably quickly,
sub-titled ‘A Blessed Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness
Prince Harry’, a long poem about torrential downpours in Devon that looked as
if it might have been co-opted into service as a first laureate poem but even
if it was, it was an impressive way to start. Not much else done in exchange
for the sherry bears comparison with it.
Wolfwatching
in
1987 had been a partial return to the earlier books of shorter poems, its title
taken from one about an animal in captivity in London Zoo hearing the sound of
distant traffic.
Before his death in 1998, Birthday Letters was published, the poems saved privately over all
the years since the death of Sylvia. In some places these were regarded as some
kind of atonement and Seamus Heaney, having read them in manuscript, said that
to read them,
is to experience the psychic
equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure
where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.
Not all of us think they are his best poems but the
fascination with that relationship ensured that they received much attention.
He was the last of the Laureates who had the job for
life. In Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy we now have two living ex-laureates.
Few will deny that Ted Hughes was a major figure in English poetry. Even fewer
are likely to argue that he wasn’t controversial.